For use: Friday, February 2, 2001

Future Shoes: "David & Goliath"

by Michael Finley

Computer User Columnist`

I was out of town last week, and as far as my son Jon, 12, was concerned, I could not have timed my trip worse.  I had just taken his system in for a new hard drive and memory upgrade. The job was supposed to be done before I left, but you know how these things go. By the time I shipped out, the PC was still not ready, and Jon was halfway into the China Syndrome, with meltdown close at hand.

Jon badly wanted to test drive his new machine, so my wife Rachel, a lovely woman who does not always see eye to eye with desktop technology, elects to pick up the PC in my stead, during her lunch break.

Through no one's fault, when she arrives at the shop, it is not quite ready. Her schedule is very tight with me gone, so she decides to take the PC as is -- unaware that the case is not bolted on, and several faceplates where old drives have been had not been installed.

OK. So Jon is home alone with an unformatted slave hard drive and a computer so opened it looks like one of those old barns that the sun peeks through. He is clever enough to boot up the PC using the start-up floppy, and format the new 19 gigabyte computer.

But then something bad happens. A fellow gamer turns him on to an Internet speedup utility called NetSonic (from Web3000) that is supposed to accelerate things like gameplay, at the cost of displaying ads in the corner of your screen. Jon downloads and installs the utility, but something goes wrong: with NetSonic aboard, his modem is unable to do anything beyond establishing a connection. He can log onto the Internet, but he can't surf or download or get mail.

He's sharp enough to identify NetSonic as the culprit, so he uses the Windows Add/Remove utility to expunge it from his system. But it doesn’t work. Some of these little wizards embed themselves deep in the Windows registry, and repel all efforts to uninstall them. Add/Removes tells him he can’t remove Web3000 until he first removes NetSonic -- which he has already done.

At this point I return from my trip to find Jon having a certifiable Bad Computer Day. I am impressed he was able to format his D: drive by himself, and decide to let him tackle the problem himself. I wonder if he can see the process through on his own.

Using my PC, Jon visits the Web3000 website, where he learns that tech support for tricky issues (those exceeding the 80/20 rule of FAQs) is available only to paying customers. The last thing he wants to become now is a paying customer of Web3000.

I suggest passing the problem on to a third party, give him my VISA number, and empower him to call Microsoft Pay-Per-Use Technical Support. It's David and Goliath time: can Jon describe his problem to a professional in such a way as to get it fixed? Or will he so annoy the technician that he gets hung up on, never mind the $30 fee?

He does a surprisingly good job leading the technician through the logic of the problem. The Microsoft person speaks in an accent of some sort, and doubtless wishes he were talking to someone three times 12 years old. Jon's only crime is occasionally rushing ahead of the technician's suggestions, in a "Don’t tell me, I know the answer" form. I do that, too.

If anything, he out-thinks Goliath, who suggests the problem is with Jon's ISP. "That can't be," Jon says. "We just use plain Dial-Up Networking to connect to our ISP. And this problem happens when we dial into AOL, which has nothing to do with the ISP."

I'm pumping an intellectual fist, and thinking: Yessss!

What's all this mean? A week later, Jon still doesn’t have his system working. I still haven't bolted his case back on properly. We're on the verge of formatting his C: drive to erase the NetSonic gremlin and start over again from scratch. Jon knows this is a grave undertaking -- no guarantee he'll get all his peripherals and programs reinstalled right. So we aren’t rushing into it, at his request.

But I'm encouraged. The kid knows his way around the computer, and more important, around the intellectual challenges posed by the computer. He rode into battle with the best, and darn if he didn't stand his ground.

I should leave town more often.