 By Christine Burns | IRQ'ed, but not bitterOr how I learned to plug and prayThe technological revolution may already be upon us, but in my view, you've not had a proper revolution until somebody's run amok with an axe. |
Oh .. I KNOW what you're thinking, but I don't mean the corporate axe in this case. We've had lots of cases of that in the past few decades, with more to come I'm certain. No, when all's considered, boardroom beheading is (how shall I put it?) all rather clean and tame compared to the frenzy of blood and splaterred brain tissue that's on my mind at the moment.
What I'm talking about is the stuff of "Angry computer user beheads vendor in car lot revenge". I'm dealing with the sort of reaction that Leon Trotsky could identify with.
In short, I'm a bit cross and frustrated.
Although everybody's talking these days about the coming of "plug and play", I've been reminding myself in the last day or so about the pleasures of a far-older tradition which I've now decided should be called PLUG AND PRAY.
It all started a couple of days back when I'd been to see a customer to beg for some more business and came away feeling in a celebratory frame of mind. He hadn't said 'YES' .. but then the self employed eventually learn to take anything short of bodily ejection from the premises as a positive sign. He wants a quote for the next phase of his all-singing, all-dancing administration system and that'll do for me as a cue for a song. Besides, the sun was out. So, it was whilst in this frame of mind (and whilst following a 300 ton abnormal load back up the motorway at the stately pace of ten miles an hour), that I convinced myself that my business absolutely MUST have a scanner...
Now, I have to admit that I wasn't entirely without misgivings about this idea. There was a vague sense of doom in the pit of my stomach, but I chose to ignore it. It was probably just guilt. I have these crises whenever there's something to be bought. It was far more interesting to focus on all the interesting photos I could turn into GIFs and send to friends.
I could digitise my signature ... OCR all that stuff I haven't got round to typing in ... maybe even start setting up a document storage system and dispose of the filing cabinet that squats, out of place, under the stairs in my hall. Plenty of excus^H^H^H^H^H .. er .. justifications .. for adding this vital piece of business equipment to the modern woman's computer inventory.
Besides .. it was nice to take a half hour detour in the warm spring sun to the computer store. I could just go inside and look... Get a demonstration... I am a consultant after all. I need to know about these things. No need to buy ...
So, there I am in my office two hours later. Changed out of my best "I'm worth the fee" clothes, bright new box open on the floor, bits of polystyrene already clinging to my leggings, screwdriver and anti-static strap at the ready.
The first part, of course is to get the PC out from under the desk. This, I've discovered is the downside to having moved up to a tower unit .. or was it an oversight not to get the floor tiles stuck down? It's not a heavy computer, yet it could have done with some sort of handles on its' oh-so-sleek box. Then I wouldn't be lying under the desk like a car mechanic struggling to push from the back whilst positioning my bum (can you say bum on the Internet?) and heels to hold as many carpet tiles in place as possible. And, of course, it's a good time to reflect that it might be a good idea to try vacuuming the office occasionally.
The cover comes off the PC quite easily .. but then that's when I started to remember the fuss I had when trying to fit it back on last time. It was when I'd spent three days sorting out the net... (gulp!) ... er, network card that I'd bought to attach my newly acquired 100MHz, all-singing, all-dancing wonder machine, to the faithful 20Mhz rustbucket I'd struggled to make do with for six years. NOW I remembered where that tingling in the pit of my stomach was coming from.
"No, don't be silly Christine", I thought. "You've sussed that problem long ago. You're not going to play musical chairs with the configuration again. This one'll be easy. See, it says here in the installation manual ... just set the switches so... Hey, but this board doesn't have any switches! Great ! They've changed the board .. probably taken months designing and testing this new, cheaper to produce ASIC-strewn wonder .. and not bothered to reprint the installation manual."
OK, so this was one of those clever new things that has a go at configuring itself to fit in with everything else and maybe a diagnostic which you can use, if that fails, to do the job from a nice friendly point-and-click menu .. I could cope with that, I thought, and set to again with the screwdriver.
Five minutes later I've picked a slot, made sure not to lose the retaining screw for the bracket in the bowels of the machine (been there before too <g>) .. pushed, and waggled and grunted for five minutes (with the antistatic strap severely cramping my style) and the board is finally located with only one broken fingernail and (thankfully) no broken hardware. The scanner's unpacked and plugged in. I brush down my clothes (suddenly I'm starting to curse buying the tower design <g>) and switch on...
Well at least it booted up OK ... but as it did so I noticed, with another of those unpleasant feelings in the pit of my stomach, that the machine couldn't recognise the CD-ROM any more. At least the sound card worked though .. and the network card. "Simple", I thought. "I'll just install the software, configure the board to use one of the IRQ lines that are free and then we'll be rolling".
For the benefit of the uninitiated, the rules of "Plug and Pray" require you to understand about TWO things, called <base addresses> and <IRQ>s. Each board you add to a computer has to have a unique block of 'addresses' where the software can access the various bits that tell the new hardware what to do, and where it can read the information which the board has acquired from the outside world. When the board needs to shout for attention it also needs to be able to electronically <tug> the processor on one of fifteen special signal lines called <Interrupt ReQuest lines>. Each peripheral board has to have a unique IRQ and so, when you fit a new one, you have to work out which of the fifteen IRQs haven't been used already .. and what set of addresses are free. In fairness, convention dictates a lot of the assignments, so that the preset ones are often satisfactory. But new devices, like CD-ROMs and Sound Cards and Network cards all came along after the conventions for simpler things were established. Ever since then it's been a bit of a free for all .. which is all very unfortunate if you happen to have several of these technological wonders already installed.
Anyway, now we get down to the bones of the matter. (You are still following this, aren't you ?). The reason why my CD-Rom had gone into an electronic sulk was obviously because something was using the same IRQ line that it was set up for. So, all I really needed to do was reconfigure the new board and oh ...
To get to the scanner card's setup program, you had to run the install program for the software that came with it. Fine. I did that .. and found that the IRQ options it offerred were rather bizarrely limited : 3,4,7 and 11. Now IRQs 3 and 4 are conventionally used for COM: ports .. and since the machine has got two of those built in I can't use those IRQ lines. IRQ 7 is also conventionally used for the parallel port .. and the machine has one of those already too. And IRQ 11, is what I thought I'd configured the network card to use last time I played this game. (On that occasion it was the sound card that had me chasing for an alternative interrupt).
Worse still, the scanner's setup program wouldn't let me complete the installation process anyway, because, as it helpfully pointed out, the board had an IRQ conflict .. on (of course) all four IRQs that the program would let me try. (Think about this for a moment please, because the designers obviously didn't). With heavy heart I aborted the setup program and removed the new board to sort this out ... already wondering why I didn't simply take the thing back to the store in the morning.
Worse was to come, however. With the new board removed (and another expensively manicured nail looking decidedly unmanicured) the CD-Rom drive still wouldn't work .. and a misleading error message had me on an hour-long hunt for a 'missing file' that had never existed till I finally spotted that (for some reason that I really can't figure out) the network card had moved to IRQ 15 and the offending IRQ 11 was free in any case. Since I was, by now, wondering how I was going to schedule an engineer's visit in the next few days to fix what seemed like a dead CD-Rom (on the face of it) anything now seemed worth a try. So I tried reconfiguring the network card to IRQ 10 (which the manufacturer's diagnostic insists was free). After all, if that worked then I might be killing two birds with one stone.
Result? No CD-Rom .. no network .. and Windows hung up with just the wallpaper showing. Nice wallpaper though, good choice. A photo of a sand dune with a fig tree in the distance and a cloudless blue sky. Sums up my state of inspiration at times like this). OK, not to be beaten I set the network card back to IRQ 11 .. and .. at last, everything worked again as it should. (Pause for ten minutes to access files on network, play favourite MIDI track, call CompuServe and load Encarta ... just to be sure).
At this point, to sum up, I'd already spent three hours, uprooted half the floor tiles in the office, covered myself in dust, broken two nails, and was just about back to where I'd started. At least I knew what to look out for now though. Perhaps, now I'd sorted out the rest of the configuration it was worth having another go with the new board....
Note the emphasis on getting the new board to fit, by the way, rather than shuffling something else. I'd remembered fully, by now, the fun I'd had getting Windows for Workgroups to work with the network card ... finding the driver which the manufacturer had nested three directories deep on their "comprehensive support diskette" and struggling with Microsoft's round-the-houses way of configuring the IRQ for that. I'm a great believer that if it ain't broke, you don't fix it. The new card had to fit in with the configuration as it stands .. and if it can't then it's back to the shop as unmerchantable goods.
This was when I discovered (after spending twenty minutes searching) that the only way to get back to the setup dialog in the scanner's installation software was to re-install the software from scratch. I joke not !
Still, by now I had a really powerful urge to scan a picture just to make all this pain worthwhile. It was worth one more go, surely ? Perhaps I'd missed something ? Perhaps there was a way to use one of the IRQs which did appear to be free? I'd even gone into the BIOS setup program to check what it thought was free and what wasn't. So I reluctantly ran the scanner installation program again (good job it's a 100MHz computer, at least) .. got to the configuration dialog at the end and found .. nothing different.
So, I have an expensive piece of hardware with a manual the manufacturer couldn't be bothered to update, and an interface card that gives you a choice of just four IRQ options, three of which are conventionally used by devices that are installed as standard in most modern PC's.
I'm writing this as a sort of therapy. An alternative to thinking of creative adjectives to hurl at the manufacturer (whose blushes, you'll notice, I've spared). Tomorrow it's a Saturday and I'm too busy to get to the computer store. Sunday .. well Sunday's never felt the right sort of time to shout at computer store managers. So perhaps on Monday I'll get back in the car (it will rain and be cold of course) and take the box back to the shop to get a refund.
Hasty ? Well, you see I've done the round of calling the computer store ("oh, speak to the manufacturer"), calling the board's maker ("oh, ask the PC manufacturer"), going to the PC manufacturer ("oh, I think you'll need another PC") ... BEFORE.
If it doesn't work, it's not MY job to debug it. It goes back. Pronto. So, that's the end of my excursion into scanning technology it seems. Maybe I'll try again when the industry invents a new concept :
How about "plug and work" ?
Copyright © Christine Burns, 1995
