Darned Computers
 

Computers have been around a good time now, but they still can't get things right.

A few weeks ago I bought a new decent spec Dell (I'm not criticising them) and all was going well.
Today my DVD was no longer recognised. Un-useable. I tried for hours to get the computer to recognise the DVD drive. No driver updates worked. Removing and re-installing the drivers etc. failed to work. Checked the Dell Help site and that of Microsoft. Hundreds of people seem to be having problems with drives not being recognised.

Tonight I remembered that there was an update for Apple iTunes yesterday. Think it was about 73MB. I removed Apple iTunes and hey presto, everything is back to normal.
I'm no computer expert but have played around with them for years. I hate to think how much trouble a novice would have and the costs that they might incur trying to sort such a problem.

I sometimes think that it would be useful to substitute "cars" for "computers" in a piece like yours, Lancelot37!

That's not meant as a criticism, in any way - I agree with you.

SD

I sometimes think that it would be useful to substitute "cars" for "computers" in a piece like yours, Lancelot37!
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Indeed so. in my day, in the 50s/60s70s you could strip a carb at the roadside and effect a repair. These days you would need a degree just to open the bonnet. And once it was open you would not know what you were looking at. Progress? I wonder.

My last breakdown with a new modern car a couple of years ago resulted in the rescue truck arriving and being hooked up to be towed to the nearest agent. I asked the driver if he wasn't going to look under the bonnet. "No point" was his reply. "Nothing I could do anyway" It then cost about £50 to have it hooked up to a computer at the dealership just to see what fault came up on the computer. Progress - I don't hink so.

Yes, but it complies with European Emissions Regulations which your old one wouldn't have done.

That's why you can't have a carburettor any more (they won't meet emissions), and why you need all those sensors all over the place. They feed the information to the computer, which works out what to do with the fuel supply and the ignition etc etc etc. Since you have a computer in your car's control system, it might as well do as much as possible, so it also tells you what mood it's in, feeds your trip information display, controls the radio, and who knows what else.

It's darned clever stuff. Not for a bloke with a hammer to fix, though.

Or in other words, legislation to create jobs and thereby tax revenue by making things impossible for an individual to be able to fix it.

It also means that I can't run the car on 4 to 1 petrol/parrafin mixture as I did during petrol rationing, which many people will not have experienced. One and a half gallon a week didn't get you very far.

I still have some of my petrol coupons.

Regulations which require it to run on a specific air fuel mixture to allow a catalytic converter to change one lot of pollutants into another - CO2.

And has anybody done a "Whole Life" energy calculation recently to see if a modern car is actually any better for the environment than a well maintained older one?

Yours cynically etc...

To get back on topic for a minute: I hear a lot of complaints about iTunes, its bloat and its reliability, especially on Windows. I don't use iAnything, but I used to have Apple QuickTime viewer on my machine, and it's now gone - so if iTunes is anything like as bad as that, I feel for you... :{

To continue the thread drift above - there is still a considerable body of opinion that cats don't work most of the time in this climate anyway.

To continue the thread drift above....Why can't we buy home brew kits anymore.

I thought the thread was "darned computers"!

Covers a multitude of evils :}

SD

The computer is pretty much essential to get the catalyst working fast, and to keep it working. Most of the "allowable" emissions on the test cycle are emitted before the catalyst gets to working temperature: there was talk (may now be becoming fact) of having to pre-heat the catalyst to working temperature before allowing the engine to start.

Opinions vary widely about the validity of catalysts on cars. I spent too much of my life in Brussels on this very subject (years ago). Catalysts were "mandated" by bureaucrats, possibly under pressure from one lobby or another. The general consensus back then was that there were more efficient ways to achieve the same result. Nobody could tell now - the requirements have moved on, and nobody is doing research on non-catalyst technology.

But the computers to drive all that stuff have their fringe benefits on digital toys for the driver ;)