Computer Blue

The great thing about computers? They make life easier.

I bought an MP3 player a coupla years ago. It only holds thirty to thirty five songs (128mb) but it's small and light and is decent for physical activities and traveling. It interfaces with Real Player through a USB connection and the load time isn't too bad.

But you do tire of the same thirty songs pretty quickly and when the IPods started popping up with multi-gigabytes of storage space, I knew it was only a matter of time before I procured one. The tipping point was reached when my wife took an interest in MP3 players. As often happens in marriage, what once was mine (the MP3 player) became "ours", before finally becoming "hers" for all intents and purposes.

So in order to ensure domestic tranquility we needed to get a new MP3 player. Which, by the immutable laws of marriage will be hers, while I will get back what I originally had. Essentially I had to buy a new MP3 player in order to be able to use the one I bought more than two years ago. (At this point single people are furrowing their brows in confusion, while the married guys are nodding knowingly.)

Last Sunday we bite the bullet and bought a 15gb IPod. The salesman explained that in order to use it with our PC we would need to install a forty dollar Firewire card, which they happened to be stocked out of at the time. A bit of an inconvenience I thought, but a small price to pay for the wonders of the IPod. The next day my wife picked one up during her lunch hour at work.

That evening I cracked open the package, rolled up my sleeves, and got to installin'. After disconnecting the umpteen cords, cables, and wires and pulling the PC tower out into the middle of the room, I looked for the manual to guide my operation. I couldn't find it right away, but did come across the 'Quick Set Up' guide which had some directions on taking the machine apart. So I started taking screws out, prying off panels, and sliding out drives until I reached a point in the instructions with a bold warning:

To Proceed Further You Must Follow The Instructions In The Owners Manual

No problemo. That owner's manual had to be around somewhere. After all I keep EVERYTHING like that. I have owner's manuals for products that I've long ago donated to Goodwill (or given to JB if Goodwill wouldn't take them). I have the owner's manual for my in-line skates. I have the owner's manual for my coffee grinder. I even have the instructions/owner's manual for some wire shelving that I installed over our washer/dryer years ago. I HAD to have my PC owner's manual.

But I didn't. A conclusion I reached after an hour spent fruitlessly scouring and rescouring every possible location. Houston I had a problem. Now usually under such circumstances I would have jumped on the internet and located a suitable substitute. But my internet delivery vehicle was sitting in the middle of the room, stripped of its protective shell, with its innards exposed to the world.

I now faced a choice. Proceed with the installation without guidance, hoping that providence would see me through and I wouldn't cause irreparable damage to my precious PC. Or cease my efforts for the evening and wait until I had more complete information. Discretion being the better part of valor, plus the fact that I was tired as hell led me to choose the latter.

The next day at work I did some research. Some painstakingly, lengthy, and unnecessarily complicated research thanks to the clever folks who designed the HP web site. What I wanted was an online version of my missing owner's manual. What I got was a very user unfriendly series of links and searches that led me through a Byzantine maze of web pages. Finally, after more than an hour of frustrating dead ends and false leads, I managed to gather what I figured was just enough to get by.

Back at the home office that evening I resumed the chore. I discovered that it wasn't just the HP web page designers that were rather oblivious to the needs of their customers. Here's a question to the HP engineers who laid out the mechanical design of my PC: could you make it a little bit frickin' harder to access the PCI slots? The way they were positioned made it almost impossible for anyone with hands larger than Verne Troyer to get at em'. I was kneeling over exposed my PC (now on its side), with the sharp glare of a shop light in my eyes (necessary for the intricate operation), beads of perspiration on my forehead, trying to slip the Firewire card into an available slot in a move which required the manual dexterity of Victor Borge, and swearing like JB Doubtless on his way to Mass.

After many miserable failures I finally managed to jam (yes, jam not slide) the Firewire card home. I secured it in place and put all the pieces of my PC back together. Then I re-plugged in the plethora of connections, pushed the power button, and muttered a few 'Glory Bes' under my breathe as I prayed the patient would spring back to life. Hallelujah! All was as it had once been. Windows recognized the new card and automatically installed the required drivers. Now we were cooking with gas.

By this time my wife was already slumbering and, since it was going to be "her" IPod, I decided to wait another day before setting it up on the PC, so that she could get in on the ground floor and understand how to use it.

With Wednesday night came the prospect of finally wrapping things up and joining the IPod universe. One last task and the Promised Land would be reached. I popped the IPod CD into the PC, fired up the installation program, and made ready for the coming bliss. And then...

An error message flashed on the screen:

IPod is not compatible with this version of Windows. IPod is only compatible with Windows 2000 and XP. (or something to that effect.)

WTF?

I grabbed the simple yet elegantly designed IPod box, and in small print on the back, read the same disheartening words.

Sumofabeetch. For you see my PC's O/S is Windows ME. I know, I know. ME sucks. It's unstable and prone to crash and lock up. But I'm a rather simple man when it comes to computing matters and was willing to put up with these defects rather than upgrade. I had heard horror stories of O/S upgrades and had no desire to entangle myself in one.

But now it looked like I had no choice if we wanted to have an IPod. And it would be nice to have a better O/S. I quickly resigned myself to that fate and hit Amazon to find out what the damage would be to upgrade to XP. Not bad price wise.

Then I started reading some of the reviews of the XP upgrade. They were pretty evenly split.

Upgrading to XP is fairly easy and it has some nice features. I say do it.

And

I would rather sacrifice my first born to Satan than upgrade to XP again.

Seems as if they're a little issue with what they call "backward compatibility" when you upgrade to XP. Seems that in order to use a lot of the software you use with ME, you need to update a bunch of drivers. Seems that some of the software you currently use with ME won't work with XP at all, and that you'll "lose" this software if you upgrade.

So this is where I sit. We have an IPod that we can't use. We have an O/S that sucks. But if we upgrade we might not be able to use much of the software we have now. And we're going on vacation next Wednesday and it sure would be nice to have that IPod working for the flight to Miami.

Computers. If they make my life any easier I don't know what I'm going to do.