Call me suspicious

My Father in law decided to buy a new computer on the grounds that his existing one is completely shit. Being the ‘computer person’ of the family, I confirmed to him that the fairly high-spec desktop from ‘The Computer Shop’ advertised in the paper for £399 was a pretty good buy and so he went out and bought it.

Last night was the night I went round to plug the wires into the correct sockets for him. All went reasonably smoothly. There was one large annoyance though when it powered up.

If there’s one thing that bugs me it’s software that installs crappy stuff you don’t want without asking. Worse is a new PC that comes with crappy stuff you don’t want pre-loaded. This PC however reached new levels of annoyance – it had advertising software pre-loaded. Being the computer person of the family though, I was the only one to be annoyed at this to a degree that produced ranting and raving about the ‘scummy swines’ who had built the thing. When it booted up, there was a big advert for ‘SupaNet internet’ in the middle of the screen inviting you to click continue to set up your internet service and choose how much you wanted to pay them in a minimum twelve-month subscription.

It doesn’t end there. My father-in-law is a user of AOL, so in went the AOL CD and it installed nicely and neatly without a hitch. I went through the setup process and AOL tried to dial-up to retrieve the access numbers for the area.

‘The modem could not establish a connection’

Strange. Lets try the Windows Internet setup, which is supposed to dial a special number and retrieve a list of ISPs to choose from. The modem didn’t make a sound.

Dialing… Hanging up… ‘Your modem could not connect.’

Drat. There’s something wrong with the modem. The usual things were tried in the usual increasingly desperate order, checking the driver disk, trying different cables, trying to query the modem directly (worked fine), trying different phone numbers, trying crossing fingers when you click things…

Then I tried re-booting and the SupaNet ad popped up again.

“I’ll try the pre-loaded one. That way when we take it back to the shop we can tell them that even that didn’t work”

Guess what? Supanet found the modem and dialled quite happily, swiftly downloading a web-page of prices to choose from.

So my Father-in-law has a PC with a modem that can’t dial any phone numbers except the Supanet Internet access number.

Call me a cynical bastard, but I find that highly suspicious. It’s going back to the shop, anyway.

Add comment February 20th, 2004