Old Moon

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

More Techie Challenges

Some months ago I wrote about problems getting Internest access set up, and particularly Vista's mail program. It wasn't easy, but I survived. I'm not sure I'll make it through all that again, now that ATT has joined forces (I don't pretend to understand how) with Yahoo!. (The exclamation point isn't mine, it's Yahoo!'s!) (The second one is mine in that sentence.) There's something perverse about requiring what is often an unnecessary punctuation mark in one's trademark.

Now, fed up with Microsoft's tendency to fix what ain't broke, I decided to go to a Mac. Maybe I won't be required to pay for an expensive update of the OS every couple or three years. Probably that was a completely idiotic thing to try. A whole new learning curve.

For five (5) days now I have been either unable to send or unable to receive messages, or both via e-mail, on both machines. Some of what I need to do is send digital messages that are unsatisfactorily late and cumbersome to people who need to put them quickly and without effort onto their computers. We don't want to have to print them out, scan them, and then get them into the recipients' machines, and we don't have days in which to do that in some cases. It really isn't just whimsy for me to be trying to send and receive e-mail. 5 days! ATT technicians have been patient and polite and have spend a total of almost 5 hours with me (in 4 different sessions). The trouble is, once one of them succeeds in getting test messages to go through and I've heaved a sigh, the next day everything is back to square one. The other odd thing is that settings are different after each of these nice people has finished with me. If I could face the hassle, I might well throw in the towel.

I just had a phone call from someone who wanted me to tell him how to put his photos on an ad he's putting on Craig's List. He didn't know what I was talking about when I asked him what format the photos were in. He didn't know what I meant when I asked him what his operating system is. He told me his computer is 10 years old and hasn't been updated. That's when I decided I should be grateful I'm better off than he is!

1 comment:

Glenda said...

There is just so much to learn and we will never know it all, but you are helping those who don't know what you know. I appreciate that.
Today the Verizon man came to re-wire my house for a phone and after he left I found I no longer had Internet. Although I called, no one responded. After working with it for hours, I bypassed the FAX machine and found my email. But soon the Verizon man came back and in just a few minutes he had everything working again.
We are all challenged by the new technologies but we won't give up, will we? Good luck with the Mac. I'm impressed with the ones I've seen and the ease of making slide shows, etc.