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!

Don't Change Your Server!

Can you believe 7 days, average 6 hours per day, to establish correct settings on Outlook Express? We've just survived (barely) this ordeal. I understand very little about the mathematics involved with figuring out the possible number of combinations when dealing with 5 pages that have from 4 to 8 possible choices on each one. I do know it's a lot. It took 7 technicians (in India and the Philippines) to set up our computers.

Okay, so who needs 4 computers? But that's not the point. We have 2 desktops and 2 laptops, one of the latter equipped with Vista. How many more possibilities are now added to settings?

It took 4 days (3-hour sessions twice a day on average) to set up the first desktop. By the time it worked, I was feeling pretty cocky, so I decided all I had to do was to duplicate the settings with a different e-mail address for the second one. Wrong.

Another day to get the second desktop going. Finally--good.

I moved on to my laptop, thinking I'd just duplicate the settings. Wrong again. Another half day. Well, now I'm really getting the hang of this. It should make setting up the second laptop with Vista less of a problem.

Definitely wrong again! 2 full days to discover that a virus protection had to be completely un-installed (not merely disabled) before that mail program would work. After my husband re-installed his protection, we heaved an exhausted sigh, and I returned to my desktop. It had been the first one set up and running.

You guessed it. Seven days into the exercise, and that computer would no longer work.

By this time I've become an expert at changing settings. This upsets the technicians on the phone because now I can make the changes faster than they can tell me what to do. Not to worry. I wouldn't bother the poor girls any more. By now I can do everything except set up and run in Safe Mode to make basic changes to the whole system (I do leave that to the experts). I spend another 2 hours changing Outlook Express settings, and at last -- the promised land of e-mail is mine again!

Now to claim the incentive monetary rewards promised in the promotion that started all this. You'll see more here if they don't come through. Believe me, the time spent doing this was worth a lot more than $225!