So, this guy at work (newspaper) rolls up to my wife and says, “Hey, the company that I work for just went belly up so the boss is unloading a bunch of stuff. He gave me an office computer, but mine is way better–you wannit?” Everyone in our life knows I run a 1999 Compaq, WIN98-SE, 340 Mhz processor with a 2 gig HD. It has a modem, but you have to feed the squirrel regularly or else you can’t get internet til the new ones hatch in the spring. They know this because I have to explain it to the PC Game fans that, “No, I can’t play that game on my PC” way too often. So the wonderful woman says, “Sure. We’ll take it.” So we gave up the Compaq (formatted a few times and with no OS installed, naturally) and brought home the Beast.
Didja know that Win 98SE won’t load on a network ready e-machine from the 21st century? Sounded batty to me too, but shore 'nuff the graphics were wrong (16 color), modem didn’t work (no driver for this one in WIN98), sound card was silent. My big fat RAM Chip wasn’t right either so I had to let it go. Shucks. So off to the computer store to drop $70 on the long-put off OS upgrade. This is starting out bad I thinks…and I’ll be wanting that extra RAM before this is all over. So, I get my XE on and I get some modem, but none of the other problems go away. OK. Off to emachines.com and I download a stack of drivers and eventually all is groovy. Graphics are very nice, games are silk smooth, yes. This will do nicely for the next 5 years.
But…MS has gotten too smart about copy protection. Apparetnly purchasing the stuff isn’t enough, you have to “activate it” either online or over the phone (codes and stuff) or else it doesn’t load and you can’t play Solitaire anymore. It’s 11: PM. I dial up and of course…“Unable to verify your right to use this product” or some such. So I place a toll free call (to india as it turns out) to shed some venome and get some support. “Raj” was cool enough and gave me the magic numbers.
here’s my point: All done, I put on my best Rerun voice and say, “Thanks Rodge!” and he didn’t get the reference. Don’t they have TVs in India?