Holiday Tech Support

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The Mac Mini + Bluetooth situation is fucktarded.

8am – Discover 20+ different viruses/spyware/malware are competing for CPU time on my parents computer. Windows has changed enough from 2000 to XP for me to have no idea how to turn of the “you’re retarded so we won’t let you access the control panel or filesystem directly without using wizzzzARDs” crap. Gave up.
9am – Go to Apple Store, purchase top of the line Mac Mini, Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, video switch, Apple Pro Care so my parents can get support and free classes, etc. The works. The Apple Store and mall are surprisingly quiet. They did not even have to use the roving clerks that can ring up your purchase on a little wireless PDA.
10am – Start working on installing a wireless hub so that I can get my laptop on the internet without slowing to Bluetooth/cellphone speeds. Added bonus: the parents’ computer is no longer DIRECTLY CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET and is behind a nice little NAT router.
Noon – After having set up the wireless, Norton Antivirus, Ad-Aware, Firefox, and removed all traces of iexplore.exe, proceed to unpack the Mini. Half-way through install process, cannot get keyboard to recognize. A Knowledge Base article suggests that I need a USB keyboard to set up the Mini before it will handle a Bluetooth wireless keyboard.
1pm – Return to mall. Discover parking situation is much worse, but the gods of parking shine down upon me and grant a quick and easy space. Proceed to Apple Store. Wait in line of 30-40 people buying iPods and iTunes gift certificates. Exchange keyboard.
3pm (yes, two hours later) – Install keyboard, use existing USB mouse, Mini is installed and ready.

At this point, I no longer accept tech support on Windows machines.

Posted in: Dear Diary

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