A thin slice of pain

Today I had three things to do, only one of which brought actual discomfort.

I started off by optimizing a home/business PC. It was really pretty much there, but needed a little tweaking, and some random crapware removed.

Then, off to finish up the home network that I started yesterday. Installing the external drive is trivial - plug it in and it works. Connecting the router was a little trickier, since the DSL modem decided it would rather not play nice and seized up. I had to call Bangalore, or some such place, to have a jackal read me a script. No trouble shooting, no explanation of my observation of the problem; but a lot of condescension from him. Just a script. He may as well be automated. So after he noticed that everything I said the first time was true, and just power cycling the bloody thing didn't work, he did what I asked him to do in the first place and got the modem back on line. Then he started trying to explain to a mentally challenged dolt like me how to get an IP address assigned, and I lost it.

He seemed perplexed when I mentioned that the reason the IP address wasn't getting assigned was that the NIC naturally assumes a subnet 192.168.1.* and he had me change it to 192.168.2.*, so I repaired the connection and it was all better. He asked me to look at the google page page. I told him I was already looking at a web page. He repeated his request... and I hung up on the little spider monkey.

Enough was enough.

So - last anecdote of the day comes by way of Lesson Time. Write this down: the application, Antivirus XP2008, is very, very bad mojo. Do NOT download it.

Its the sort of malicious plague that first you pay to download, then it turns your wallpaper into a warning sign, tries to open a million browsers, removes task manager, and generally renders the PC useless. I have an Optiplex GX260 that I'm cleaning up for another customer. He'll get it back tomorrow, all shiny and fresh. And let that be a lesson to him.