TheChrisD - Rant Central

Getting Technical

Technology may be good, but it sure can be slow. For example, today, I was moving about 20GB of data from one folder on my external hard drive to the PortableApps Menu so the programs would show in it. Who knew it would take 20 minutes to move?

Anyway, at least doing that was much easier than trying to understand two Portugese guys who had a problem with their laptop!

I’ve been getting a little lazy in wanting to launch all the games and programs I have on my hard drive. Instead of going to “Explore” in the menu and then actually navigating to it, now I have them all 1 click away (well excluding the clicks needed to scroll up/down).
Oh, how I want the next version of the PortableApps Menu to be released so I can remove the links to all the relevant un-installers from the menu!

Anyway, back to the Portuguese guys.
They came in saying something about drivers. Obviously, once I heard the word, I knew exactly what they were on about - it was getting to that stage which was the hard part! Alright, so he managed to tell me (in very broken English):

“I had a problem with the computer, so I was advised to re-format the hard drive. Now I need the drivers for my hardware and I also need to get Windows XP Home as the re-format put XP Professional on”

Only thing is - it’s a little hard to help someone get drivers when: the computer was made in Portugal and the only Google results for it come back in Portuguese, I can’t understand anything on his desktop, cos it’s all in Portuguese (well what do you expect?), and also when I eventually get to the Device Manager (having to first open it on the work computer and following the icons on his laptop), the devices without drivers show up with question marks - so I can’t tell what type of devices they are.
Needless to say, his computer wasn’t fixed there and then.

I just hope in future, they can learn how to fix their own driver problems and not leave the CD with the drivers and Windows XP Home back in their native country…..