Getting machines up to par
I promised I was going to write about moving a product from niche to mainstream, but the experience at my in-laws was just an interesting (frustrating?) enough that I had to blog about it.
My in-laws live under some odd budgetary constraints. They definitely do not have a lot of disposable income, yet they seem to spend money on some things (like a cruise or a big vacation to places like Disney World with their son and his wife's family) which seems to me to be a bit over the top given that I feel like they scrimp on some basics (like a decent car and some household items). To me it's just a different situation and people who have a much different set of priorities than I was brought up with. The whole point in saying this is to give the background about the computers in their house.
My father in-law use to work at a computer rental company both selling, servicing and helping to build the business by being the resident IT support staff. He's been retired for at least 7 or 8 years when the company started to grow and got acquired by another company he was laid off and figured he really didn't want to work any more. So he's relatively knowledgeable about computers (or at least you would think so!) Well his home machine was a Pentium 3/550 which was definitely past it's time. It only had 6 gigs on it and was so loaded down with the residuals of past programs that no longer worked and other things that while it worked for surfing the net, it was by no means a good computer to work with. On top of that he had a 17” monitor that was fuzzy as all can be. Plus with his basic configuration he's got USB running from the cable modem directly to the computer so there wasn't a network in the home for me to connect to, so I was stuck looking at the real bad image on the machine trying to do a little bit of work and surfing.
So my brother in-law (his son) picked him up a “new” computer a couple of weeks ago, so I figured that since I'm here and always bored to tears here since I didn't grow up there and basically have to go on what ever errands my wife wants to visit old friends etc, that I'd put together his “new” computer as well as set up a basic network in the house (my treat) so that they could use the old computer as one for the grandkids.
Well it turns out the “new” computer was really a relatively old P3/900 that his son had picked up a computer swap meet for $100. Well for $100 it's not bad, it had all the components was properly imaged with Windows XP, had Office on it plus had a 30 gig hard drive. So I figured that I'd make sure it really was clean and re-image it myself etc. That wasn't too hard of a deal, but I began to think as I waited and waited for the machine to respond every now and then about whether or not it wouldn't have been more expedient and a better purchase to just spend another $300 and get a white box brand new machine with a faster processor better video card etc. His son also several monitors (also used) that he picks up every now and then so that he would replace the current one and bring over another monitor. This is where I don't understand the money expenditures, I for example wouldn't have probably ever bothered to buy such an old machine and would have just spent the money to buy a bare bones new machine, but like I said it's a different lifestyle.
So off I go to Best Buy since that's really one of the few places around here to buy computer related equipment especially since they were having a sale on routers. I pick up a router, some ethernet cables, an ethernet card for the old machine, some more memory for the “new” machine, etc.
So I spent the better part of yesterday putting the new machine together and getting the LAN working. Of course it didn't work out of the box. The D-Link router would see the machines on the network even my laptop which was wirelessly connecting, but just for the life of it would not get an IP address fro the WAN. Nothing I did made any difference, so I had to go call their tech support which luckily didn't take too long, but it was some advanced setting for the network speed that they had me switch which finally did the trick. That was good since I was loosing face, not that it really mattered. I was able to connect then with my laptop and with the old desktop. But the funny thing was that the desktop machine would just keep losing the internet connection every few minutes. You could get to a site or two and then it would just totally stop for no reason at all. Still don't know why that happened, but I suspect it had something to do with ZoneAlarms since I had trouble getting the application to even respond on the machine -- once i disabled that permanently it finally started to at least maintain the connection.
For me however it was frustrating as the old machine was really in a sorry state, but all the knowledge I have of networking etc, didn't allow me to trouble shoot why the connection got dropped etc. At the same time I was setting up the “new” machine and once it was ready I figured that I would just share out the c: drive of the old machine to copy files over as well as remote desktop to it since I only had one monitor at the time. Here again the machine just didn't want to respond when I was doing all the obvious things and the time just kept slipping away. Well after a day of doing this and finally getting it to work long enough to copy over the documents and some install programs for applications he had previously purchased, I finally got it all up and running. At this point I then ran a virus program on the new machine and didn't notice that it also was going to scan the network share, which in retrospect was a good thing since it started to find all sorts of viruses that it just couldn't seem to remove. So off to get the WinXP disks and another machine to pave over....
What I really wonder in doing all this is how often do people (not those in the technology field) have machines that just don't know how to fix and thus end up not fixing and living with something that is sub-optimum or how many people just throw it all out and just buy a new machine and be done and over with it (without ever getting their data off the old machine?) Sure there's a wizard in Windows to help with this migration, but that probably would have been a lot more work or at least had it's own set of issues.
