Ordinary Gweilo

There are times when I really wonder about PCs. I am not an expert by any means, but I understand the basics and I’ve even added a few bits and pieces (DVD drive, extra memory and disk, an Ethernet card), yet I still sometimes find myself totally baffled by things that don’t work how they should. Surely the point of the home PC (and consumer software) is that it ought to work with minimum hassle, and not require much technical expertise.

I have had two recent problems that completely baffled me, but which eventually turned out to be caused by upgrades. The first prevented me from accessing any secure site (https://www…) and stopped my wife from accessing her email through Outlook Express. The second problem caused some content not to be displayed on a few websites, which in a few cases made them useless – for example, bulletin boards where the messages were not visible!

To be honest, I feel slightly stupid that I didn’t figure out the problems earlier, but then there are people with much less technical knowledge than me who purchase PCs and expect them to work properly. I thought I was doing the right thing – installing the endless fixes from Microsoft and keeping my software up to date – but now it seems that this may have made things worse!

The first problem turned out to be related to an upgrade to Internet Explorer that I only installed because it was supposed to stop IE crashing. The upgrade had failed the first time, with a strange error message about the upgrade not being certified by Microsoft! It eventually did install, apparently successfully, and I thought no more about it. The first time I couldn’t access a secure website I simply assumed that it was temporarily unavailable, then I sent an email to the website owner and was told that there were some problems and they were working on them. When the problem was still there several days later, I called Netvigator to see if it was their problem, and although it wasn’t (this time!) their engineer was quite patient and the conversation reminded me of the upgrade. Un-installing it put things right again.

The second problem was less serious, but more puzzling. I wanted to find some information on the Hong Kong Post website but was confronted with a screen that had no menu. Someone suggested it was a Javascript problem, so I wasted time playing around with that, but it made no difference. Then I found a bulletin board where I couldn’t see the messages, and when IceRed upgraded to v3, that had the same problem. Eventually someone from IceRed suggested it might be caused by Norton Internet Security, which I first installed when I got broadband. I recently upgraded to the new version of the software and apparently they had introduced a new feature to eliminate pop-up ads and by default it was enabled. For some reason that I don’t understand, Norton was blocking content that was essential to the website and which (as far as I am aware) was not doing any harm. I have now switched it off, and all seems to be well (except that I can now waste more time looking at stuff on the Internet).

I also had a minor problem with the Gweilo Diaries. Since Hemlock’s arrival as Conrad stand-in, most of the posts have been showing strange characters in them, presumably because they were composed in Word (or something similar). The fix is apparently to change the encoding in my web browser, which seems to be work OK, but I never had to do that before!

Shouldn’t PCs be simple to use? Or am I being naive?