Don’t trust the experts

One lesson that I keep re-learning is that you should not blindly trust the experts.

Sometimes they get it wrong, sometimes they don’t know the answer and sometimes they just don’t care.

Often though, instead of telling you they don’t know, they will give you an answer to make you go away and stop hassling them.

Now I’m not suggesting this is a malicious thing, more that a lot of people can’t admit they don’t know the answer so they’ll either have a stab at getting it right or make something up that sound plausible.

A couple of recent examples of this are when my Vista PC went on the fritz and when I got digital TV installed.

My Vista PC was working fine (well as fine as it gets for Vista) but then weird(er) stuff started happening.

When I would boot it up things would be fine up until it went to display the login screen, then my monitor would display a ‘no signal’ message and go into hibernation. The hard drive was still merrily spinning away and as far as I could tell the OS was loading properly.

I’d re-boot into safe mode and it would work fine. After playing for a bit I figured it was the Nvidia video card drivers causing the problem.

Things continued on until I got fed up with it and took it into the computer hospital (it was still under warranty).

They had a look at it and ended up re-installing the OS and everything was fine. Apparently the OS was totally corrupted.

I figured ‘fair enough’ it was not something I would have been able to fix by tweaking stuff.

The initial diagnosis of faulty RAM (made when I dropped the PC off proved to be wrong).

So I took my fixed PC home and eagerly plugged it in (I’d been without it for a whole week!!)

It booted up and bugger me…. Same problem!!

Since it was the weekend I decided to try a re-install myself. After all I had nothing to loose. So I re-installed Vista and away we went. No problems. Everything was fine…..

Right up until I installed the Nvidia drivers. Then guess what….. ‘no signal’.

So into safe mode I went, rolled back the driver to the Microsoft generic one, and then rebooted back into normal mode.

Everything was fine. My PC hummed along quite happily. (apart from the screen saver not working because I have a wireless mouse etc.)

Then Windows did an automatic update and whopps!!! Those damn Nvidia drivers were back in charge. We battled for a bit with the drivers taking over every time windows even thought about updating.

Long story – short, I buggered things up trying to disable the drivers.

Now I’m back using XP and I’ve had no trouble at all.

The lesson in this is that my first instincts were correct. The experts said I had faulty RAM and then a corrupt OS. Now to be fair they guys where I took my PC are great. They give the best service ever and a probably one of the cheapest places to get things fixed.

I’ve bought 3 PCs and a laptop from them and you can bet my next PC will be coming from them also.

But in this case they got it wrong and I was pretty sure I was right when I told them what was happening.

The lesson here is if you think you know what’s going wrong don’t be afraid to trust your instincts. And if what the experts tell you sound a little ‘off’ don’t be afraid to call them on it. I really think that most of us are smarter than we give ourselves credit for.

Now for my digital TV.

I got it installed with my broadband as a package. No worries there. When the guys were hooking it up the picture was really bad. It was wavy and bumpy. Some channels were better than others and it didn’t happen all the time.

They fiddled around a bit and came to the conclusion that it was either my TV that was the problem of my DVD recorder.

My TV is only a few month old, and while not being a flash one (A Dick Smiths special) it should still have been able to cope with digital TV.

Now I admit the picture was always a bit of a problem, but I put that down to it being a cheap telly.

But with the way it was wobbling it was just not fun to watch. If you sat way back it wasn’t too bad, but I couldn’t watch it for more than an hour or so without getting a headache.

So I persevered for a bit until yesterday when I went looking for a new telly.

So I was looking at about $2000 to get a good telly that I hoed would solve the problem. That’s a bit much considering I don’t spend a lot of time watching it. And I had no guarantee that the new telly would not have the same problem.

Then last night I was trying to finish watching Apocalypse Now (I’d got halfway though and then couldn’t take the wavy picture any more) so I dragged the TV cabinet out and started fiddling with the wires, with some interesting results.

At one point I got the Simpsons all in shades of blue. It looked quite cool actually.

Then suddenly I got a solid picture. Bingo!!

So I sat down quite happy to watch the rest of the movie.

Now I have good steady picture and good sound.

Another case of the user triumphing by ‘having a go’.

So the next time something does not work and the experts walk away with a shrug of the shoulders, don’t just put up with it.

Have a go yourself. You’re a smart person, figure it out and make it work.

Might be best if you turn the power off first though. (unlike me)