Tonight I went to an ultra nerdy local computer users group meeting. The room was packed. I had hoped to meet some young, hip, cool, entrepreneurial geeks (like me, right?), but alas the room was filled with mostly older people who had recently purchased a computer. Oh well.
What I found amusing, however, was that some of the problems people were having, issues that weren't all that unusual and that could be solved with a simple change in the system preferences, resulted in lengthy technical discussion by the Top Gun Nerds at the front of the room.
Elderly Lady: "My screen turns brown after I use the computer for a while, but it goes back to normal after I wiggle the mouse. It's very annoying."
Top Guns: "It could be a bad video cable, or maybe your video card is going out. Remember back in '95 they had the video card issues? What type of video card do you have, ma'am and how much vram do you have? What OS version are you running? Go into the console and run this and that and examine your logs to see what may be causing the problem. If the logs don't tell you anything maybe your monitor is going bad."
Elderly Lady: "Huh?"
Nerd in the Crowd: "It's your Energy Saver setting. You have it set to dim the screen when you don't do anything for a while."
Elderly Lady: "Yep, ok. I bet that's it. Thanks."
Top Guns: "Oh, uh, yeah. Well, that could be it too."
Why don't they have you running those meetings? You could solve all their problems without all the geeky stuff, in plain language. Those poor old ladies would be ever so grateful, I'm sure!
Posted by: margaret Winn | Monday, August 07, 2006 at 02:30 PM