Ever have one of those Thanksgivings when you go over to your relatives house and after dinner they mention that they still haven't gotten their laptop connected to the internet (the topic of last Thanksgiving)? Last time they needed a PCMCIA 10/100 card, and since last Thanksgiving that's as far as they got.
So dinner ends and they mention it. Do they have the drivers for the card? Nope. Use their terribly slow ancient other computer to download the drivers for the NIC. Do they have the software for their DSL service? Nope. Go to Earthlink's site and of course they don't have a PPPoE program for WinME.
Search the internet seemingly endlessly for a free WinME PPPoE program to get their donkey connected and finally find one where the site isn't down, it works, etc. (searching for freeware is sometimes a bit annoying, heh). Of course it is zipped so I had to download a Zip program.
Throw it all on the other computer (zip, NIC, and PPPoE programs) and you'd think they'd know their password, eh? Nope, they spend 1/2 hour looking for that. Geeeep eeeeerrrrrrr zibzibzib. Calming down...
Get the password and she then wants to send/receive email. Do we know how to set up Outlook? Of course not. Go to back to Earthlink and find the mail servers, and of course email has another password (15 minutes of searching for that). Then she wants to send pictures. She can send one, just not more than one. Show her how to attach more than one. Then they want to know how to set up different users on the computer...
ARGH! It was like a tech support holiday! At least the dinner was good...
So dinner ends and they mention it. Do they have the drivers for the card? Nope. Use their terribly slow ancient other computer to download the drivers for the NIC. Do they have the software for their DSL service? Nope. Go to Earthlink's site and of course they don't have a PPPoE program for WinME.
Search the internet seemingly endlessly for a free WinME PPPoE program to get their donkey connected and finally find one where the site isn't down, it works, etc. (searching for freeware is sometimes a bit annoying, heh). Of course it is zipped so I had to download a Zip program.
Throw it all on the other computer (zip, NIC, and PPPoE programs) and you'd think they'd know their password, eh? Nope, they spend 1/2 hour looking for that. Geeeep eeeeerrrrrrr zibzibzib. Calming down...
Get the password and she then wants to send/receive email. Do we know how to set up Outlook? Of course not. Go to back to Earthlink and find the mail servers, and of course email has another password (15 minutes of searching for that). Then she wants to send pictures. She can send one, just not more than one. Show her how to attach more than one. Then they want to know how to set up different users on the computer...
ARGH! It was like a tech support holiday! At least the dinner was good...