End times coming before too long for PC hardware geeks

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I really have been trying to get away from my geekiness and do not sell or configure PC systems as a hobby anymore, but sometimes the occasional “Please help Joe said you were the guy to call” will stir me to action more out of a desire to assist than the renumeration that a couple hours of onsite diagnostic and configuration work will generate.

Anyway, I was at this house the other evening trying to help this guy transfer the data contents from an old WIN 95 (orignal 95 not 95b) non-USB Packard Bell to a new 8250 series DELL WinXP Machine hooked up with a NIC transfer cable - Neither machine was seeing the other - The 95 machine out of cluelessness and the DELL XP machine because it was suspicious of the 95 and I didn’t have the technical chops to flip all the appropriate password and access protocols the XP unit wanted in order to open up to the 95 unit. I’ve bridged 98 and ME machines to XP, but 95 was a different challenge entirely. After noodling around for an hour trying all my prior XP connection methods I finally brute forced it by removing the 95 hard drive and slaving it to the DELLS drive chain.

Anyway - This DELL Was unlike anything I had seen before. It was more “intelligent” and appliance like than any other PC I had ever dealt with. The owner had mistakenly installed another NIC and the the DELL simply, gracefully turned off it’s onboard NIC and switched to the Linksys and switched back when the Linksys was removed. The DELL recognized, configured and booted up with the old 95 drive attached without a hitch. Everything I did to this machine, or plugged into it, or removed from it, it handled seamlessly and without a hitch. Once XP is on everything and hardware like this is everywhere the PC is going to be a lot more applicance like and the days of the PC hardware geeks are numbered .

2

Nah, there’ll always be a need for hardware geeks. What happens when that seamless adjustment goes wrong?

3

Duh. Duct tape.

4

There is always work to be done with scsi devices.

5

I’m not going to miss jumpers and IRQ conflicts. I’ll be more than happy if I never open a case again - although I suspect that day is not quite here yet.

6

Gentlemen, gentlemen, do not forget Our Users.
They can break anything

7

You do realize that the first two halves of your thread don’t go together? It really couldn’t have escaped the attention of the designers of XP that someone, someday, might have wanted to network their machine to a Windows 95 machine, that the people still using W95 would probably be the less sophisticated user base and that this process should therefore be be as simple as possible.

8

As a computer geek, I’d much rather spend my time figuring out to do something cool, like set up my computer to be a Tivo (haven’t done this yet), than spend it digging around Windows registry keys and drivers, trying to convince it that it does, in fact, have a CD-ROM drive.

We won’t become extinct, we just won’t be able to use our skills to get laid anymore.

9

Considering how infrequently many (not me of course… harrumph) some geeks are able get some action that alone will put a serious dent in our numbers. :frowning:

10

Welcome to Macintosh :wink: