Me a Geek - NO Way!!

He he ho ho....

Whatz so funny ? Well I was trying very hard to be polite and get the DVD burner on myDELL laptop to start working, all this while troubleshooting with a DELL rep for the 3rd time in the last 2 days...Because I have been there, done that, I know how difficult it is for a tech support person to help, to understand and solve the problem while the customer is being rude and impatient..I tried to keep calm but every tech that I got hooked to was quite stupid..I really don't want to say this but its true...They made me download and update every driver that they could think of, flash the BIOS, reinstall PowerDVD of all things...PowerDVD is for playing DVDs not for writing you fools! Meanwhile, I played along..The first time I called up the lady tried to pass the buck very smartly, telling me to do the diagnostics and then call back with the exact error..Well there was no error....

I kept telling them that the hardware is fine and its just either a software thingie or some stupid option that I must've sometime messed around...Anyways, the second time I called the guy got me to update the drivers thing..Funnily enough, the actual driver for my Hitachi DVD+RW drive was niether found anywhere online nor on my driver CD..The poor rep was also amazed as to why the driver was not available on DELL's website..I informed him forget about DELL, I already tried Yahoo and Google but haven't found the driver anywhere in this WORLD WIDE WEB...One would have thought at the least Hitachi would have it available online!

The third rep I talked to today was in a hurry to get me a new drive and except system restore he had no advice to offer...What then? Well I wasted 2-4 hours with system restore, recovery console -->repair, physically removing the drive, and what not...Finally, it turned out to be a stupid software issue..I just uninstalled and reinstalled my DVD writing software and the drive was back working as normally as it could....Why didn't I think of this before? Really how stupid could I be? Leave apart me being stupid, none of the reps even once asked me to reinstall my DVD writing software...What matters is that finally on my own I got the drive back to complete functionality...

A few days back I decided to try the Yahoo toolbar for a change...Whether it was really for a change or because I was super-mad at Google for not offering me that position for which they got me to interview with 12 people including a VP, I forget! Anyways, apprehensively at first I decided to get rid off my Google tool bar as it was letting through loads of pop-ups thus, not serving one of the main purposes of its existence on my laptop....The Yahoo tool bar is surprisingly far better than Google..Not a single pop-up has passed through and it has now been almost 2 weeks...On top of that I really like their anti-spy feature on their tool bar..This feature allows you to run a quick search for 3rd party spyware and adware trying to slow down and invade your system and throws them out in a jiffy....Plus I have also started trying Yahoo search a lot more and learnt how to compare the differences between Google and Yahoo search and use them to my advantage...

Next thing that I was to learn today was about privacy issues concerning referrer information transmitted by web browsers...I must say my curiousity first arose when I saw one such blocked referrer entry in my website traffic file...I think this HTTP referrering business is serious and there is no good reason for me to tell Yahoo or for that matter any other site which website I visited prior to coming to their site...

After a day full of reading tons of tech articles and user guides to resolve my DVD issue and then finding an easy solution just when I had given up hope and was about to order a replacement drive; I felt very elated....Elated coz I had solved my problem on my own..I had not given up when the tech asked me to..I had started logically with diagnostics passing and the device being detected and then checking the physical drive and then trying a system repair to hopefully repair any registry errors and then at the end dumbly enough I knew it was just the software..And how true..After a few hours and a whole working day down the drain yohoo my DVD is burning away...and all based on common sense....Hence, at the end of the day I got this giddy feeling that I am no less than any of those nerds out there..They may know the in and out of what they are doing but hey I had worked out things even without knowing initially what I was doing...

All the comp tech stuff today..Whoosh!.. Seems quite amusing to me... At the least for a day I think I am geeky....