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A little humor and something kinda’ strange…
Okay, so I’m working away on a very complex project when a client calls me to take advantage of one of our studio’s support services. It seems that he has a problem installing a freeware language tranlator on his iMac and he asks me to walk him through the process because his computer locked up on the three previous install attempts.
I tell him to insert the disk and the installable file should appear on the CD image. About a minute goes by and he asks me “whaere’s the image supposed open to?”. I tell him that it should appear on the CD unless it was a opened by the installer on its own. Another minute goes by and he says “still nothing. Now what?”
At this point, my head is about to explode from the pressure of masking a layer in my comp and tutoring this guy so I tell him that I’m on my way to his office and I’ll fix it in person.
20 minute drive and a fish sandwich later an I’m in the “saddle” at his office. Power up and I hear the old familiar “chime”. An odd screen shows up and lists the drives and other incidental hardware and gives me an “OK to proceed” text. A bit wierd but on we go. We were chatting about business when low and FRIGGING behold, I hear the WindowsXP start-up music. Yep, this guy had done the impossible and gotten WindowsXP media edition to run on an old G3 iMac. I asked him if he know that he was running WindowsXP and he say…with a straight face, “Don’t all computers use Windows?”. Now, I don’t know if this guy ha had the luckiest streak in history or maybe he’s just blessed, but he’d purchased almost 10 different “mac” software pieces that had both a PC and Mac version on the disk and he never knew.
I asked him how he got it to work and he politely said, “I didn’t. You walked me through the installation of Windows last October”!!!
Smile!
Michael Munkittrick
Gainesville, Florida USA -
3 Replies
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Why am I hearing the Twilight Zone music right now???
;^)
Ron Lindeboom
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No kidding! I don’t recall exactly where I heard it, but I seem to remember someone from Apple saying that the inherant differences in the PCs motherboard and the Apple logic board (amung other things) makes running Windows very, very difficult if not impossible on an Apple product. This guys understanding of computers is so far from the norm that he accidentally broke through a technical boundary by falling through it face first. He still thinks that I was kidding with him when I told him I’d NEVER seen that before. The phrase “dumb luck” never meant so much.
Michael Munkittrick
Gainesville, Florida USA -
That’s mighty strange stuff, indeed. While I’ve worked on both Macs and PCs over the years, I’ve been using PCs for about the past 10 years. I remember well, in my last job, which was at PCTV (we produced a weekly TV show on computers and software), we reviewed a product called “Soft PC” (if I remember correctly), which ran on the Mac SE. It took so doggone long to boot into the Windows interface that we couldn’t imagine why anyone would possibly want to run it – maybe to get Tetris to work? I don’t know.
Anyway, it looks as if things haven’t changed much. If you want to run something for the PC on a Mac, buy a PC…and vice-versa.
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV
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