I’ve often wondered if there was such a thing as bad Geek-karma and I’m nearly 100% certain that there is. I mean all Geeks have had the days where we’ve attempted to upgrade a PC and there’s just one problem after another. You go to add a new DVD drive to your PC and once you get the cover off you realize that there’s a problem with the cable. Then a jumper is missing. Then you discover the BIOS has to be flashed a new version, so you need to put it all back together to do that, only to find out that you don’t have a driver for the new drive. After that you spend the next four hours on web sites trying to read Korean, Tagalog, Japanese and Chinese because you only have the drive manufacturer’s name and they don’t have a US web site. At some point during the driver search, the hard drive collapses and you need to reinstall Windows. What else could this be but bad Geek-karma? And while this particular example is rare to occur these days – Windows automatically supports almost every DVD drive made after 2001 – the premise still stands even if the particular parts are different. I should know because I had two old typos reversed this week and I attribute the creation of both typos to bad Geek-karma.

The first came about during an IM conversation with Steve, when we were talking about something ‘puter related which caused me to look at the System applet in Control Panel. The first tab was kind enough to tell me my version of Windows (XP, SP1), my total RAM (512MB), and that I had a 2.53GHz Pentium 4 @ 1.90. *blink* 1.90? What did this mean? My desktop PC is homegrown and upgraded once every 8 to 10 months – I’ve had the same floppy drive for years, literally – so I knew there was no “SpeedStep” technology like I have on my notebook. There’s no way Windows down-shifted the CPU speed for me. So I poked around. Seems that the last time I upgraded my BIOS it reset the CPU speed to “manual” which in this case was 1.90GHz. I turned that back up to 2.53GHz and rebooted – the System applet now told me 2.53GHz Pentium 4 @ 2.54. I had been underclocking my CPU for months! Ironically enough, I haven’t noticed a speed difference – sorta makes all of the UberGeeks that have liquid nitrogen cooled overclocked systems look like self-defeatists. Talented, true, but it seems no matter what I do to a machine it still takes just under a minute to boot and Word will only ever open so fast.

The other thing that I found/fixed I have been in the dark about for over a year or two – that’s just depressing! I have three different Hotmail accounts that I check a few times a day. Up to now, I’ve been using the web based system of retrieval which is painful, since the .NET Passport is tied to multiple MSN sites – means a lot of logging out and logging back in. I knew I couldn’t get to the Hotmail system via SMTP/POP3 because there was a holy fury about Microsoft cutting off that support a few years ago, so on a whim I went to Tucows and did a search. I had remembered that there were once a collection of “mailbox checkers” out there that lurk to multiple mailboxes and return the number of new messages. When I did a search for Hotmail I was shown a bunch of applications… I downloaded a freeware one and it worked but it was ugly and slow as all hell, so I looked at the list again. Towards the bottom was “Outlook Express”. !! Outlook and Outlook Express can get Hotmail? I figured it was an old post, but sure enough when I added a new account to Outlook Express that ended with @hotmail.com it recognized it as an HTTP based account… Outlook has the same thing. Never even occurred to me that I’d be able to get to Hotmail via an HTTP web service call and that’s probably what upsets me the most. After all, MS has been talking about web services for years now – I was there for their first introduction to them in 2000 – so where the hell was I? Bluh…

At least it’s good to know that even thought bad Geek-karma exists, it doesn’t last forever!