Can I have 12 Gigabytes of Memory in my PC, please?

... or how to tell the difference between a mechanic and a driver

I had the occasion, the other day, to have a conversation with an old friend. He wanted a favour from me - no problem in that, of course. Where the problem lay was in giving him the advice he needed.

His brief to me was simple. He'd bought a PC second hand (previously owned or cherished, if you're a car salesman) and he wanted me to help him 'sort it out'. That kind of thing is right up my street, so I readily agreed. When he arrived, has asked me to 'put everything on it that I can have, so I've got nothing more to add to it'. And therein lay my problem.

The question is, where do you stop? OK, a decent graphics card, a decent sound card (the kids want to play games with good sound and speedy graphics), a modem (hey - he needs to be able to read PPC!!), a scanner, decent printer, but what next? What else might he find he needs in a few weeks' time?

Favours

What's more to the point, would I be doing him any favours by loading the blessed thing up from day one? Wouldn't it be better to get the basics sorted and then show him how to perform simple upgrades - perhaps pointing him at our own How To series of articles so that he can learn what makes a PC tick?

So, I sat and thought about the whole thing for a while. When it comes to cars, you see, I haven't the foggiest idea what happens under the bonnet (or anywhere else that gets dirty on the things). If a warning light comes on - aside from the washer bottle light - I take it back whence it came and get them to sort it out. Same applies to servicing and so forth. It's not that I'm thick, it's just that I don't really want to know. I like driving it, I can make it get where I want to go, and that's about all I want.

If I wanted super-dooper blue headlights and a fancy go-faster gizmo fitted, I'd have to get the blokes who do such things to perform the surgery, because I neither know, nor want to know, where to start.

Mechanics

That said, I have friends who like nothing better than to get under the bonnet of their motors and fiddle with this, tune that, attach various bits and bobs to flanges and grommets and use technical terms that they know will confuse me. So I came to the conclusion that the world is divided into two types of computer user - there's those who know the far end and where it comes from about them, and those who couldn't care less about the hows and whys and wherefores, and just want them to do what they want them to do, when they want them to do it.

After a little further rumination on the subject, I decided that this bi-partite approach just might be a little too simplistic. After all, even the most dunderheaded car driver needs to know where to put the petrol, and most of us know the basics of what happens in an internal combustion engine, without necessarily knowing the specifics or the difference between injection and carburation.

Even so, I have had conversations with real live people who have attempted to fold a 5.25 inch floppy disk in order to make it fit into a 3.5 inch drive. I have met people who have refused certain sound card to speaker connecting leads on the basis that the one they lost had right angled plugs, and the one they offered didn't, therefore it couldn't be the right one.

Gimme the badge!

I've even met people who, when faced with two identical monitors, from the same manufacturer, same model details and specifications, save that one had an Apple Logo on it, and the other didn't (and was around two hundred pounds the cheaper for the lack of the logo) spent the extra dosh on the 'official' Apple product. That was one I couldn't get my head round at all. Said person agreed that they were, indeed, the self and same monitor, and that they were functionally and cosmetically indistinguishable. All the logic said 'buy the cheaper one'. He agreed. But the Apple badge won out!

Anyway, by the time my friend brought his PC around for me to cast an eye over, I'd made up my mind. I'd set it up for him, give him a shopping list and send him off to make his purchases. Once he'd got them, he'd either decide to tackle the easier jobs himself, or he wouldn't. In either case, I decided, the die would be cast, and I'd know just where on my sliding scale from PC Zero to PC Hero he was, and could act accordingly.

Until he comes back to me, shopping trip completed, though, I've no idea!

 

David Dorn