The high-tech hall of shame

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1998 by Rick Broida

What's all this about a year 2000 problem? Hey, we'd like someone to solve the Year 1998 problem--namely, that computers are still a nightmare to operate, upgrade, troubleshoot, and repair. If there's a home-based worker who hasn't lost work, sleep, or hair due to the ordeals of contemporary computing, we'd like to meet him or her.

Do any of these techno-crimes sound familiar? You connect a new scanner to your parallel port, and now your printer won't work; you attempt to install a data storage device and discover that you no longer have access to the data you're trying to store; you want to double-space your document, but can't find the setting amidst your word processor's maze of features; you try to find help in the instruction manual, but you aren't fluent in Greek; you double-click on an icon that worked fine yesterday, and today nothing happens; you navigate through a sea of phone-support menus, only to be told that the department is now closed.

The horror, the horror.

Computer products can be so baffling that many home-based workers are loath to install new equipment or update their current technology. We're not just talking hardware, either--software has grown so feature-rich that performing the simplest of tasks has become complicated. And technical support? Please. Either you wait on hold for an hour (on your dime, thank you) or buy a support session that costs half as much as the software did. Of course, there's no guarantee that the support rep at the other end will know any more than you do. Sure, you could refer to the manual, but if that answered your question, you wouldn't have had to place the call for help in the first place.

Do we sound mad? You bet we are. So it's time to point fingers at some of the products that have driven so many of us into therapy. These offenders generally fall into three categories: balky hardware, bloated software, and heinous help. We've amassed some shocking stories, not just from our own experiences but from real-world users as well.

Of course, we don't want to leave you shivering in the dark. At the end of each section, you'll find tips for dealing with these hazards of home office computing.

Who Put the "Hard" in Hardware?

When you buy a toaster, you can be eating toast three minutes after you open the box. When you buy a SyQuest SparQ drive (www.syquest.com) or an Iomega Zip drive (www.iomega.com), you can be struggling to get it working properly days or weeks later. Ditto for a second hard drive, a CD-Recordable drive--basically, any product with the word "drive" in it. Scanners, printers, PDAs, and digital cameras are no Sunday picnic, either. Why is it such a hassle to add or upgrade PC components?

Part of the problem is that today's Intel-based computers are still based on decades-old technology. Every device, from the hard drive to the graphics card to the printer, must vie for a limited number of system resources. When those resources dry up, your devices have to split the difference. Sharing may be great for kindergartners, but it's arsenic to your PC.

Modems and sound cards are the worst--convincing them to coexist is like asking for a quiet day in the Middle East. Graphics-card drivers are notorious, too; the wrong driver can bring an otherwise healthy system to its knees.

Imagine two trains on a collision course. They stop just before the crash, but remain nose-to-nose because neither one can back up. That's what happens when two devices try to share the same interrupt request line--one of 16 internal system addresses known as IRQs--in your PC. They both get stuck, sometimes to the extent that the whole railroad shuts down.

Assuming you can accurately diagnose the problem, you must often tear open your PC and fiddle with little plastic switches and jumpers in hopes of happening upon a tracker, IRQ--that's not in use. Throw in the complexities of PC architecture's limited COM or serial ports (the equivalent of trucks trying to cross the track where the trains have stopped), and you start to see why there's so much confusion.

This is one key area where Macintosh (www. apple.com) users have a clear advantage. Generally, though not always, adding new Mac hardware is a truly plug-and-play affair. "If I plug in a video card, chances are it will work," says Todd Stauffer, author of the forthcoming Mac Upgrade and Repair Bible (IDG Books). "In my office, I never have to troubleshoot the LAN or Internet connections--they just work."

Stauffer admits that the Mac platform isn't perfect--adding external SCSI devices, he says, can be a pain--but insists it's far easier to live with than any Windows-based PC: "There's no registry, no shared DLLs [Dynamic Link Libraries], no interrupts, DMAs [Direct Memory Access], or text-based configuration files. Everything inside a Mac almost always works."

Case in point: Many owners of Packard Bell PCs (www.packardbell.com) have reported upgrade difficulties, largely because the systems feature integrated components that don't want to give up their posts. Karl Nonnenmacher, who works in his home office in Chicago, tried to upgrade the modem in his Packard Bell desktop, which came with a combination modem and sound card, and found it "near impossible. The problem stymied several of my computer-expert friends," he says. "The IRQs were a shambles--Windows' Device Manager would show five or six modems at a time." He finally had to buy a replacement sound card to go with his new modem. Such are the perils of bargain-priced consumer PCs, which often rely on highly integrated (and finicky) built-in hardware.