computers suck

I hate it when you labor at some­thing for days only to find out it was in vain…

I got a bug up my ass last week­end to wipe out my old PC and turn it into a serv­er. Upgrade it to Win­dows XP Pro­fes­sion­al and only install the pro­grams I need­ed. Sim­ple enough.…

First, I backed up every­thing onto my 250G hard dri­ve. Then I pro­ceed­ed to wipe out every­thing and start installing. Had every­thing installed and my TV Tuner/Video Cap­ture would­n’t work. So I refor­mat­ted and tried again.

Got it to work, but then oth­er funky shit start­ed hap­pen­ing. So I said fuck it and refor­mat­ted and tried putting Win­dows XP Home back on. Before I Could even install I was get­ting errors and shit. So I said fuck it, I will restore my back up.

But how do I do that.…I could­n’t just copy over the dri­ve with win­dows run­ning and Win­dows XP does­n’t allow you to start up from a DOS prompt. So I labored for over 6 hours hand copy­ing file by file and skip­ping over what­ev­er files were in use.

Then by genius, I real­ized all I had to do was install Win­dows on my D: dri­ve, wipe out my pri­ma­ry C: dri­ve and copy stuff over to that and then go into my D: dri­ve win­dows and tell the com­put­er to start up my C: dri­ve back­up. It worked!!!!

But when­ev­er I would try and cap­ture video, it looked fine, but when I would play back it would skip (like a bro­ken record) on the video, but the audio would keep going. I spent four more hours unin­stalling and rein­stalling my dri­vers and always got the same shit. If I tried to install the lat­est ver­sion, then my machine could­n’t see the hard­ware and kept say­ing “Unknown Hard­ware Found” but nev­er find what dri­vers went to them.

So I revert­ed back to a dri­ver set that worked, but still got the same video prob­lems. I thought I will try a dif­fer­ent tape (I was try­ing to put an old VHS I bought on DVD so it will last longer) Turns out the VHS was doing that Light/Dark thing that would hap­pen when you tried to copy a store-bought VHS) so when I would try dif­fer­ent tapes, they worked fine.….

IT WAS THAT ONE STINKING TAPE! I SPENT A WEEK DOING CRAP FOR NOTHING!

Isn’t tech­nol­o­gy great. Why can’t we have com­put­ers that talk like on Star Trek and tell us whats wrong with them? Cars can tell mechan­ics, why can’t PCs?