Lawyer: But what about that tattoo on your chest? Doesn’t it say, “Die
Bart, Die?”
Bob: [conciliatorily] No, that’s German for “The Bart, The.”
[The spectators laugh, understanding]
Officer: No one who speaks German could be an evil man.

Following suit, I must say: The PCs, The. While doing nothing spectacular, my PC managed to do something incredible. Perhaps trying to create some excitement while I was doing the mundane, it promptly shut off and refused to boot while displaying the helpful text: Keyboard Error. Press F1 to Continue.

Thoughts and memories poured through my mind, “has nothing changed?”. I’ve seen this error a million times but never so clearly. Um. Ok. Can’t press F1 if my keyboard has an error stupid! I mean, this is DOS 5.0 coming back. My 386 told me “press F1, your keyboard can’t be pressed”.

Look at the image to the right. 1989. Same old PC thing going on. Yeah sure, I built my own (so have a lot of people) but would going to a friendly retail store change anything? No. Think Vista will change this? No.

Cheap hardware with nowhere to run

So, I unplugged everything I could and booted again. It started up fine although the BIOS had reset itself. Fine. You know, maybe it’s a crappy motherboard … but they all are! This is like the $120 router you get at a retail shop. It sucks. It breaks, it overheats, it has a zillion hardware revisions.

Come on, let’s go update the firmware on my D-Link. First, we hit the d-link tech support site. It says: Select your D-Link product from the drop-down.. Fine. I’ll pick from the list on the left. It’s 74 product families long. Ok. I pick my product family. Then I have 34 products to compete against. Ok, I pick mine. Then it says: There are multiple revisions of the DI-524, each with version specific drivers, firmware, installation guides, and other resources. Please use the descriptions and diagrams below to identify your revision. Ok fine, I pick my revision. But now there are 3 versions of the firmware. And, I know by experience that only the 2nd oldest one works for me, the other one crashes and drops packets.

Or, how about my D-Link network bridge which booted into a router? It’s the same hardware and admin page for a second when it boots and then it loads the “bridge” mode. They use the same hardware and just load the bride’s admin GUI on top of it. It’s hilarious, the bridge only has one network port (one is closed off by plastic) but for a few seconds I can see a router menu where I can configure two.

Ok fine, cheap hardware has some costs in terms of quality. Fine. I guess I should step up and buy a Cisco 877 for $500. I guess that’s the option these days. But I certainly see parallels when my motherboard’s website has a drop-down that says:

We recommend MSI LiveUpdate utility for painless and seamless update. Update latest BIOS and driver for your MSI mainboard decently.

Yeah, I run low-level Engrish.

Hai, bu nu hai (huh?)

I browsed around MSI’s website looking for some fixes and tips.

MSI wrote a password program:

The PasswordKeeper is a useful utility for Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP,
If We all have many passwords (Mail accounts, web sites, secure files etc.), PasswordKeeper will make sure you never forget a password again.

Great. I really needed a password utility. Thank god I happened to stumble upon my motherboard’s support site. Phew. This reminds me of the NRA selling knives.

Yeah, ok, whatever. I’ll wrap this up quick and not bring in any Apple/Wii innovation versus “the same old thing” references. Oh crap, I just did but no matter because Macs run Vista, so what’s a PC? Something that does not run OSX and costs 10% less. That’s about it.

Macs run Vista, Dells don’t. Not that Apple is exempt from hardware blowing up and causing fires because everyone shares components all over the place.