How dependent have you become upon technology? As I cut costs a few years ago, I got rid of my land-link long distance service. Do you really need to pay for all the extra fees they tack on: long distance connection charges for flipping a switch at the main office, phone charity charges for rural folks who use tin cans, regulatory fees to pay regulators to come up with more outlandish fees to justify their jobs. You know, things that the phone companies say add value to your call but don’t really. So I began using Skype on my sister’s laptop that I fixed. It quickly became my main link to everyone important to me.
But this laptop has several issues. While I was able to fix the software issues, the hardward ones — the ones that cost more than the laptop itself — are beginning to make themselves known. At first, they hid themselves well. Kind of like, turning on your car radio and having your air conditioning kick off every time. Eventually, a good mechanic will fix the A/C. A great mechanic will do so without replacing the radio on/off switch, the radio wiring, the speakers and the radio itself.
So when my Internet calls began messing up a few months ago, I blamed the new version of Skype and began tweaking everything in XP that I could. Sure, I was able to get great improvements in my voice-over-the-internet service. But even those improvements didn’t last long. After a few minutes of conversation, the echoing would start, parts of the conversation would begin to repeat like a frantic rapper with a record on a bitchin’ turntable, and long seconds of static would interrupt during the most important parts of the call.
But I’m not completely incompetent. I’ve been working with electronics and computers and software long enough to learn a few things. (For example, I don’t stick screw drivers or my tongue into wall sockets any more.) A laptop is simply a collection of transistors and other electronic goodies. With a good troubleshooting method, it is a million times easier to figure out what is wrong than say something as complicated as … a woman. With that in mind, I proceeded to troubleshoot with chocolate and flowers. Several weeks later without so much as a thank-you from my laptop, I contemplated turning it into a Frisbee. It was then that I realized the wisdom behind “using the right tools for the job” and promptly installed a temperature monitoring program. Ta-Da! There was the problem. As the laptop got hot (and not because I was enticing it with flowers, poetry and promises of diamonds), the main chip inside would jump to 100% of its capabilities. Sort of like a 400 pound person fanning themselves in the middle of summer. Pretty soon, they can’t do anything else but fan themselves furiously. Everything else has to waiting. So it was with my computer. It was all it could do to take care of itself and the demands of Skype.
Unfortunately, it would cost more to get new board and chips than a new laptop. My solution? A frozen gel icepack. I placed it under my laptop’s fan port and battery pack with enough space for air to circulate. That dropped the temperature by ten degrees F! (”F” for Fahrenheit, although this result did cause me to think “F’ing cool!”) My latest Skype calls went much better as long as the gel pack remained frozen. But this solution is what we in the industry call “a patch”, not a fix … unless you’re paying for it. Then it’s “I don’t know why it broke again. Looks like you have something else wrong now. Let me give you an estimate for that.”
So wish me luck as I call and write and refrain from throwing this piece of sh…shaped plastic across the room. Maybe Santa will be good to me this year. Or not. Maybe this was a bad time to convert from Christianity…
For almost three years now, I’ve been using Skype as a reliable replacement for my long distance phone service. It was free, now it’s not quite $15 per year. Much cheaper than Vonage and doesn’t have the same threaten of going bankrupt. 