....
Alias,
I'm not so sure that Windows out of the box is so easy for
newbies either.
It's hard for me to tell because my computer use dates (for
all practical purposes) to a dual 8" floppy drive system
running CP/M, but it seems to me--from observing friends of
mine--that they will limp along with a badly working
computer and not really seek help until the damn thing dies.
Different experience here! Maybe it's the class of people<g>.
The real problem comes when they don't notice a problem and
attribute it to something they caused, which they usually did,
but which is a case of ignorance, not a refusal to seek
assistance. The real problem comes when the problems aren't
quickly noticed; then there's more digging to do to help them
out. IME, they're reasonable quick to react as soon as they
notice a problem.
And having fiddled with this laptop since January, I am
here to say it did not work right straight out of the box.
If you've had to fiddle with it since January to get it working
right, there's something wrong; it may well be your opinion of
what working "right" is, not that they don't work. Or, you're
getting them "out of the box" from joe scammer down the street!
....Just today, I decided to
get rid of some more Dell crap (QuikSet, which I don't use
and don't need), and lo and behold, there went my volume
control.
That has zero to do with working out of the box; you removed
things DELL placed there, and sufferend the consequences of not
first knowing what you were removing. Your volume control was
simply not displayed any longer, not damaged. These kind of
things are why I avoid DELL. That, and the fact they only
provide OEM versions of the software, which is useless, or nearly
so, once they get through adding their mods to the operating
system.
So I reinstalled it, no problem.
You didn't have to reinstall it; only tick the box to redisplay
it. A little research might be inorder for you.
But I'll tell
you--if my old friend Fran had checked the little box to
show the volume icon in the task bar and gotten the message
I did, she'd still be mucking around in "Add and Remove
Programs" trying to figure out how to get it
installed--because that's where the error message tells you
to go.
The volume control doesn't, or shouldn't, display in the task
bar; it displays in the system tray.
What was the error message that would send her to add/remove
for this? What produced it?
Speaking of Fran, when she bought her computer, I spent
quite a few hours making it work right.
Sounds like that was her first mistake. Rather than setting up
protection for her, and educating her, you went in an adjusted
nuts & bolts all over the place on her, probably making any
instructions she had null & void in the process. Good way to
confuse a newbie.
And my former
roommate--now there's a story. I cleaned up her computer,
and I set her up with the basics--a working antivirus
program (free, because the reason she didn't have one is
that she didn't want to renew Norton for $14.95), Spybot
and Adaware. Then I moved out. A year later, I checked, and
the antivirus program had "broken" and she had never--not
once--run either antispyware program. She was also running
Weatherbug, Kazaa, and several other pieces of loaded
software that she had downloaded, but she didn't associate
the crummy performance with the crap she had on the
computer.
Why? Lack of education? Lack of instructions she could refer
to? It almost sounds like you set her up to fail, though you may
not have meant to. There are people who won't listen, and who
need to be told things in certain ways, and others who aren't
going to learn no matter what, but ... they are much the minority
in my experience. The problem is not knowing where to turn for
help, or even when to, for most people that get into deep trouble
such as that. It almost sounds like you left her without benefit
of a firewall, antivirus and spyware tools, but did plenty to
make the computer look and feel as you wanted it to. You never
mentioned the word "updated" in all that, so I assume that's not
anything you explained much either, right?
I was days cleaning it up, and you can bet that
she hasn't done any maintenance since. I'm also quite sure
that she has download a ton more spyware.
Well, you get to go back and play the hero again that way. A
better way is to educate and demonstrate why the education pays
off. Ignorance is 99% of the problem with newbies, many of whom
don't even know what questions to ask initially.
Should people like that even be on the internet? Maybe if
they had to struggle a little to get there, they'd be more
conscious of their overall effect on the rest of us.
And maybe not. Maybe, without them, the 'net would be a much
cleaner, less hostile place, but then, the lack of related sales,
etc., would also drive the price of your valuable hardware and
software sky high instead of being as low priced, even free in
many instances, as it is today. There's an ecology at work here.
Out of the home computer realm, at my various places of
employment, starting with...well, I guess we went straight
from DOS to 3.1, there was always something to fix all the
way through 95, 98 and ME.
Also in CP/M, and even DOS, regardless of the vintage and who
made it. You either didn't notice or are choosing to forget a
lot of details, or had little actual contact with them. Without
a GUI for many years, there were a lot less complexities to
create problems, and they were easier to trace "back then".
That's when people weren't afraid to write code in machine
language and the authors actually understood what the code they
wrote was doing.
The day one of my bosses decided to buy me a Mac was a day
of much rejoicing.
I have to wonder why: MACs were/are good with graphics. But as
workhorses with real power, no, they couldn't keep up. I still
think there's a good place for MACs in the environment, but that
would not change an iota of detail in the things you want to
point out. If MAC has the market that MS does, you'd have
exactly the same kind of problems going on that MS has. Because
it was a MAC wouldn't make any difference to the newbies using
them. And doesn't, by the way, except that they don't have the
market share to be as large a target as MS users are. But
reverse the situation, and ...
I admit to a little time spent getting
the Unix shell account set up so that I could get online,
but other than that, the most I ever *had* to do was
rebuild the desktop. I should never have quit that job.
I don't know the first thing about Linux, but as much of a
pain as Windows is if you want it to work right, it can't
be that hard.
Let me get this straight: You know UNIX, but not LINUX? lol,
you don't really know much about either, do you? I'm sorry, but
that blows you right out of the water and explains fully to me
why the gal you helped out ran into so much trouble.
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