Swap PC Care

I had a lovely phone call 2 days ago from a company called Swap PC Care. I know many Aussies have had experience from this and similar companies. When I picked up they told me they were calling on behalf of Microsoft and that's where they'd gotten my details from (a likely story).

I was asked to open up eventvwr and check out Custom Views>Administrative Events. Here we find lots of warnings and application errors. Most of these warning messages will get generated when you lose network connectivity for a bit, I've personally got a bunch letting me know my time didn't synchronise correctly. After reading a bit more about the more serious looking errors, it appears they generally stem from network issues, either network sharing problems or poor internet connectivity.

This 'technician' told me that all these warnings and errors were suggestive that my computer was infected. Somehow when viewing a website some malicious code found its way on to my computer. I was told this meant my credit card was not safe and that someone could be stealing my information. The solution was simple, just go to the website support.me and he'd fix it for me. He had directed me to a remote support portal. At this point I asked him to stop as I wasn't prepared to go any further without knowing anything about his company. After him giving me a company name which had a website, I still wasn't happy to go on.

This got my call promoted to the 'senior technician,' a chap with a short fuse it turns out. He insisted that they were only trying to help and that I didn't know what I was talking about so I should trust him. I was told my computer was definitely going to crash in the next few days. He repeatedly asked me to explain what the error messages meant, I said "I don't know exactly but I can see most of them are complaining about DHCP or DNS errors, which are unrelated to my system stability". I was called stupid and treated like a child. The 'senior technician' let me know that he was very busy and didn't want me wasting his time. I was asked to take full responsibility if my computer crashed and told again they were only trying to help.

Up until this point, the conversation went exactly as I thought it would. I'd spent 18 minutes on the phone to India having fun browsing the web while they didn't get paid. The call then took a turn towards the romantic. The 'senior technician' said goodbye. Then, 30 seconds later asked me to hang up the phone. I refused. We went on for a good 2 minutes arguing about who should hang up the phone. Eventually, he ended it, he broke my heart.

Does anyone know why he refused to hang up on me? Normally telemarketers are pretty quick to end calls they think are a dead end.

PiMP Pad Review

So it's been just over a week since Adelaide has gotten it's PiMP Pad, the pimp.tv supported bar jumping on the Mana Bar bandwagon. Now, I've been to the Mana Bar and have to say it's really fantastic. I don't think anyone in the Adelaide gaming community could deny that this town needs one but is the PiMP Pad the solution?

For those of you who haven't experienced going to one of the Mana Bars in Australia, let me describe the experience a little for you. You walk into a swank little room with a few bar stools and TVs on the walls. There is a bar with some very skilled person making cocktails and serving drinks. There's a variety of games being played and you just go up to whatever takes your fancy and make instant friends. In 5 minutes or so someone will hand you a controller and you're living the dream, playing video games at a cocktail bar. It's a place I could take a girl to show her playing video games isn't just for overgrown kids, it's fun and it's cool.

So how does the PiMP Pad stack up? The building used to be a bank and I kinda like it, there's a massive safe behind the counter and spray paint on everything. The downstairs area is colourful with 4 TV's and a few lounges with copies of Atomic waiting to be read (good choice). The staff are friendly and geeky, well chosen.

The 2nd floor overlooks the ground floor lounge and has TV's hanging at eye level above the couches below. These also appear to be for gaming but there isn't much space to gather because of the premium gaming PC's lined up on this floor too. The rigs are apparently Orion built and top of the line. These were offline when I went thanks to some lovely BSOD teething problems but looking through the case windows I was suitably impressed.

On the top floor there are 3 rows of PCs which makes a total of over 50 gaming PC's in the complex. All their computers have a nice bit of software on them which lets you order food and drinks from downstairs, log in to your personal steam account, play any of the games the PiMP Pad provide and do everything you could expect a net café could.

Before I go on, I'd just like to say I was there the first Saturday PiMP Pad was open and so many of the issues I am about to talk about will probably be fixed either already or relatively soon.

Currently, PiMP Pad has no liquor licence as they are situated next to a school. The management say this is going to be sorted out soon (like a couple of days) but it's been a week at there's been no news. This has changed their demographic from cool people who like to go out and occasionally play video games to one identical to the group 'People who attend Streetgeek and Valhalla LAN parties regularly' AKA 'People who want to play video games instead of drinking on a Friday night'. The problem here is that the aforementioned 'cool people' are likely to be intimidated by the sheer amount of nerd contained on the top floor. If this happens, PiMP Pad will never be a cool place to take a girl it will just become another Aztec or Cyber Hive.

There are also a few problems brought on by the old building. The stairs are far too narrow and the guys toilets are all the way on the top floor. It makes sense because the LAN room is up there but it's still a long way up. Speaking of the LAN room, it gets hot. There are air conditioners but I was sitting near one and was uncomfortably warm on a cool winter's night.

I took PiMP Pad up on their lock-in deal which was cheap gaming and a free plate of nachos. The nachos were cold and not very tasty and the gaming took about an hour to get set up as we suffered through network and software problems. The game selection is okay and covers the basics but most of their games are limited to 10 licences running at a time which isn't enough. They need to get a dedicated server running for everything in their catalogue to make network games easier too. When playing some games we needed to add each other's arbitrary account names as friends so we could play together. This is aggregating should have been sorted out before opening up.

I guess overall I have a lot of problems with PiMP Pad but it's really only because I want it to be so great. I completely understand it's not ready yet and whatnot so here are the things I think need to happen:

Put up price lists for PC's and consoles, it's irritating to have to ask how much stuff is.
Go buy some more games ASAP along with the PS3's we were promised.

When the liquor licence gets passed, I want to see mind boggling drink specials and a strict dress code in the first few weeks to get everyone pissed and change things up.

If I had to give this place a score, it would be 7/10. It gets points for style, staff and kit but loses some for poor layout and unattractive clientèle. In the comments I'd really like to hear what you guys thing but I'm also going to put down my list of game suggestions for them (for xbox and ps3 only for now) and would like input if I've missed any great social games.

Hewlett-Packard

HP have long been respected as a quality manufacturer of medium to large business printers, since their buying of Compaq, they've gained significant market share on the PC market too. I honestly have never had a problem with their hardware and am happy to recommend used HP/Compaq notebooks and desktops (ex business models at least) to friends and family as I'm confident the hardware won't go wrong. The only reason I wouldn't recommend an old HP would be to recommend a Dell. Today's experiences have changed this.

My mother is the proud owner of an HP LaserJet 1300 series printer. She has also recently got herself a stylish Dell Vostro 13 something or other. As the computer expert of the family, a position I'm sure most of the few readers of this post will be familiar with, it's my responsibility to make product A and product B communicate correctly. The printer was to be shared from her old xp desktop over the wireless, a simple enough operation one would expect.

At first I just tried to add a new network printer to the laptop, windows kindly let me know that it didn't have a driver and that I would need to specify the location of an ini/inf file to continue. No problem, I was pretty sure windows had the drivers built in but clearly a trip to the HP driver support page was needed. Navigating to the page I wanted was easy enough, Google led me right to where I needed to be, here. Where I needed to clarify there were no letters at the end of my printer's model number and that I'm using 64bit windows 7. I'd like you now to go and see what you find on the page I found.

The page has three categories under downloads for this product: Driver - Universal Printer Driver Documentation, Software, Software - Universal Printer Driver. For those of you that don't know, for unsupported printers or for people with problems, HP publish a universal driver for their printers, this is apparently hell to install and I've not heard of it working.

Now, I'm not sure why there needs to be a documentation section in the part of the website clearly called "download drivers and software" and as most of it seems to be manuals for network admins there really is no good reason for them not to be in the section called "manuals".

Anyway, moving on we look at the lonely option in the software category, it's labelled "HP LaserJet, Color LaserJet, and LaserJet AiO/MFP Products - Print Driver Available in Windows 7". Turns out it's just a link to a notice saying the drivers for this product are built in to Windows 7. The other category, the universal driver, had only a solitary entry as well, an administrator resource kit, a file that I downloaded but did not contain the universal driver.

After what I would call a fairly major failure of the HP website, I turned to the only place a man could, forums. Eventually I discovered that in order to get the drivers I needed to plug the printer in via USB and click windows update on the driver selection page. This connects to a Microsoft server and downloads additional drivers that for some reason (they probably weren't ready) are not included in windows out of the box. I gave this a shot and after about 15 minutes of waiting a driver was found and installed. Time for the twist - it didn't work.

At this point I'd lost about 2 hours (most of it was spent navigating the HP website to make sure there wasn't another product page that could have helped) to this venture and was ready to try tech support. I'd like to note that the options menu for HP's tech support line takes all too long to get through. Once I got onto a human and explained my problem she checked the website to see if drivers were available and concluded, like me, that there were only support docs on the download page. She told me this meant I needed to wait for drivers to be developed or use windows drivers or the universal driver. I asked her to show me on the website, how to download the universal driver. It took about 10 minutes before she accepted defeat. Apparently I had to find another product, probably a newer one, that had the driver on its download page. I could then download that copy and install it as it works with all printers. She then remembered there was a new version out that had it's own page, I'd been here before. When you click through to the download page, it, like all pages before it, is filled with support documentation. Fucking Brilliant! In the end she emailed me a link to the driver I needed to download. It turned out to be the universal postscript driver and also turned out not to work.

So what has happened here? I have wasted a few hours of my life trying to solve a problem that should have taken 5 minutes. I've lost faith in HP's support site and it's designers.

A few small changes they could have made to save me a lot of time:

• If the product I'm looking at doesn't have a supported driver, that should be the first thing written on the driver page.
• Every driver page should have a link to the universal driver.
• Support Manuals should be in the Section of the site called Manuals, not in software and drivers.

What should you take out of this? HP makes solid hardware that, in the case of peripherals, can easily outlast the system they're bought for. I'd recommend buying their stuff new but be careful when purchasing 2nd had peripherals. Most of the business models have really good driver support as they are expected to be used for years to come but home/commercial products are given a low priority by the support teams.