Another Stupid User!
Posted by thehumbleprogrammer on September 18, 2008
A couple of weeks ago my significant other and I decided to buy her father an entry level computer. Having completed a learn direct introductory course at the local library, and having a considerable amount of free time at the moment we thought the time was right for an early Christmas present. So we opted for a basic Packard Bell PC from PCWorld. Buying it and setting it up was really simple and within 20 minutes of bringing round to the house John was up and running.
Out came the old learn direct disk, which I have to say I was very impressed with, explaining all of the basic aspects of using the computer. The disk was packed with lots of little games to aid learning too control the mouse and such like. After about an hour of happy learning a dialogue box appeared, which had no cancel facility, luckily my other half was in the room at the time and being the jaded experienced user that she is the dialogue box said;
or words to that effect. So John was instructed to click OK and the problem dialogue box would go away. On clicking OK the sound disappeared, at this point first line support for all the families computer needs was summoned to the room. I did the usual checks to see that the sound was not turned down or that it had not been muted. The sound was coming out from the sound card to the speakers in the monitor, so I unplugged the cable and plugged it back in again causing the offending dialogue box to appear again.
As you can see the active window is asking “Which device did you plug in?”, so now I am being made to think, and as we all know users shouldn’t have to think. The device I plugged in was the line out to the monitor. So where is that option then, well ok trial and error time I went through them all and after getting no joy I was convinced that it must be the Rear speaker out option and that there must be a problem with the monitor. The assumption behind this option being, we had plugged the cable into the rear line out jack (I know, assumption is the mother of all….).
After reluctantly admitting defeat I took the machine back to PC world and explained the issue to the tech guys there, within a few minutes the guy came back handed me the base unit saying that it was all sorted. When asked what the fix was, he gave a little chuckle as if to say, don’t be a dumb user, and then said “you have to re-task the jacks, and that it was the front speaker out option”.
All’s well that ends’ well eh… Not really, to my mind it should not be that difficult to setup the sound from a computer’s sound card. The jacks are colour coordinated and so are the connecting cables. I have never had to learn what the colour coding means because on every other system I have setup I just plug the green cable from the speakers into the green jack on the system and hey presto as if by magic, we get sound. Quite simply to put the responsibility of re-tasking a jack into the hands of already overwhelmed novice users is a poor design decision.
