So, after work today I had a little service call to do. The woman bought a new Dell a couple months back and thought she was getting a burner but only got a DVD player. She bought the burner through Newegg and wanted me to put it in. Also said her sound didn't work and she needed the printer that came with the Dell set up.
First was the sound, yep, sound don't come out the line-in jack. Doh! Ok, color coding is beyond some people. That I can understand. Second was the burner. This is where I was surprised. No, astonished. No, thoroughly and quite pleasantly astounded. Dell now puts a little knob on the back of the PC, push the knob, the side panel slides right off. Whoa. Dell? Making it easy to get in and do upgrades? It took me a minute to recover. Anyway, got the DVD burner in, fired the computer up and of course XP found it no problem and I burned a test CD, worked fine.
Now came the printer and the real reason for my little bitch session. First of all, it came with the PC. Now, I'm sure the ad said it was a photo printer, but I'm not so sure that most people would understand that photo printer is not equal to printer. At least she didn't seem to understand that. Second, I understood back in the day when printers didn't come with the cables needed. Not that I liked it, but there were a few different connectors and you had to get the one that worked for your printer. Now, I still say the PRINTER connector was where the difference was and the parallel ports were all the same, so they could have thrown one of them in and I bet it would have worked for 99% of their customers, but anyway.
Today there is a pretty well known standard called USB. It's got most of its bugs worked out and it's nice to know that just about anything you can plug into it will work. It's fast, it's easy to use. It's a standard. So why, please fucking someone tell me why they can't throw a fucking USB cable in with a new printer?
First was the sound, yep, sound don't come out the line-in jack. Doh! Ok, color coding is beyond some people. That I can understand. Second was the burner. This is where I was surprised. No, astonished. No, thoroughly and quite pleasantly astounded. Dell now puts a little knob on the back of the PC, push the knob, the side panel slides right off. Whoa. Dell? Making it easy to get in and do upgrades? It took me a minute to recover. Anyway, got the DVD burner in, fired the computer up and of course XP found it no problem and I burned a test CD, worked fine.
Now came the printer and the real reason for my little bitch session. First of all, it came with the PC. Now, I'm sure the ad said it was a photo printer, but I'm not so sure that most people would understand that photo printer is not equal to printer. At least she didn't seem to understand that. Second, I understood back in the day when printers didn't come with the cables needed. Not that I liked it, but there were a few different connectors and you had to get the one that worked for your printer. Now, I still say the PRINTER connector was where the difference was and the parallel ports were all the same, so they could have thrown one of them in and I bet it would have worked for 99% of their customers, but anyway.
Today there is a pretty well known standard called USB. It's got most of its bugs worked out and it's nice to know that just about anything you can plug into it will work. It's fast, it's easy to use. It's a standard. So why, please fucking someone tell me why they can't throw a fucking USB cable in with a new printer?
