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Jason vs. PC, Round 2

Mon., January 17, 2005

My old Epson Stylus Photo 820 printer in tow, I went down to McNally Robinson Booksellers at 5:45 p.m. to meet up with Katie in preparation for Round 2 of rejuvenating her PC. While waiting for her to wrap up her workday, I settled into a chair downstairs and read some calming Pablo Neruda poems.

Soon after arriving at her place, I tackled her curséd computer with an extra copy of Windows 2000 that Jimi generously donated. Surprisingly, the installation worked without a hitch, allowing me to format the hard drive and install the system software with ease. But little did I know it was a setup for some cruel Internet troubles ahead.

I thought transferring over Katie’s DellNet By MSN dialup account would be as simple as porting over her username, password and local access number, but I constantly received cryptic authentication error messages. I called Andie for her to look up some help on MSN.com, but it only made her really cranky. I called Jimi, and he got cranky as well. (Microsoft has this effect on many.) From their valiant efforts, however, I did end up with the toll-free number for DellNet By MSN, where after a long wait on hold, during which Katie read me some trivia on Civil War generals, I was patched in with a helpful fellow named Jamie. He confirmed Katie’s account was still active, changed her password in case that was the problem, and helped me correct a stray setting or two, yet I kept getting the same error message. After both of us had listened to the distorted tone-dialing and static-ravaged pings of the modem connecting (but failing to authenticate) for the sixth or seventh time, we had the following humorlessly grim exchange:

Jamie: Those old dialup modems are really loud, aren’t they?
Jason: The sound is like a dagger through my soul.
Jamie: Mine too.

Thankfully, Jamie remained calm and eventually unearthed the problem: although the modem was connecting, the dialup number itself (or its connection) was somehow rogue. After Jamie offered another alternate local access number, the modem magically corrected its transgressions, connected without incident, and there was great nerdy rejoicing.

After bidding Jamie farewell, I smoothed out some other problems, including an amusing one with the display, which defaults to 16 colors if you haven’t installed a specific yet really hard-to-find graphics card driver. I also got Katie’s DVD player software working, which was a priority of hers since she doesn’t have an external DVD player. Alas, there will be no external audio until I buy a headphone-to-stereo-RCA cable to hook up the PC to Katie’s stereo receiver, since she couldn’t find the proprietary power cable for the external speakers that came with the computer. Finally, I thought the printer would be easy enough to set up, until I discovered pushing the power button had absolutely no effect. (And, yes, it was plugged in.) By this point, it was nearing midnight and I hadn’t even installed Office 2000, but I figured since I’d be back, I could do so then.

For those of you keeping score, here’s where we stand after two rounds:

a working, stable, updated OS, and working dial-up Internet access; working DVD player software. Advantage: humans.

non-working printer and external audio; non-installed word processing and virus-protection software. Advantage: damn dirty computer.

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On January 18, 2005 at 1:18 p.m., Jimi Sweet wrote:

I don't get cranky, dammit.