BloghuhBloghuh? is a collaborative blogging project running throughout this week, encouraging participants to write posts on things that mystify them. The rapidly growing list of participants is in the sidebar, and the post that started it all can be found here.

Computers mystify me. Which is a little worrying, since I spend all my working time and most of my leisure time using them. More worrying if you consider the fact that I'm one of the many people responsible in part for demystifying them for other people (or at the least, getting them to do what they're told).

I've got a couple of machines running Linux at home, older computers that I've acquired on the cheap (or free) because their previous owners needed much higher-spec hardware. I wanted to put a second and third network card in one of them: don't ask why unless you actually want to know ;-). So I went to my normal internet component retailer, and ordered two dirt-cheap network cards, because in my experience, a network card is a network card regardless of how much you paid.

Unfortunately, my experience is mainly of Windows: although I'm getting pretty good at running the software side of a Linux system, if it gets too low-level I'm lost.

Anyway, I get my cards, sling them in the box, and see what happens. Nothing happens. I start Googling for answers, and also check the driver disk that came with the cards. The driver disk has the drivers for about 5 different cards, and nothing in the packaging tells me which mine are, so I have to open the computer up again to see what's printed on the microchips. After many hours of research, trial and error, still nothing: even with what by rights should be the right drivers loaded, the computer still doesn't believe it has the cards attached.

I stick one of them in my Windows machine (something I was loathe to do, because that machine isn't the most stable and friendly of creatures). It works straight away: detects the hardware, guesses what it is, and even has a properly verified driver in the database from the Windows disk, without using the one that came with the card.

At 5am, I gave up and went to bed.

Today, I walked into town in the hope that I might find something in Maplin or somewhere, but with low expectations and a sour outlook. Maplin turned up a single card that despite subtly different packaging seemed to be exactly the same lucky-dip that I had already tried. Bumped into a friend who recommended a little techie/gaming computer shop a little way out of the town centre (quite a long way, in fact, but I forgot quite how far until I had already walked most of it).

They too had cards in boxes that didn't tell you a great deal, but the staff person kindly opened one in order to see what was printed on the chips, and hey presto, it's the same chipset as the card I already have working. I bought it, took it home and slung it in the machine, and it worked straight away: because the drivers were already loaded for the other card, I wasn't even walked through installation like Windows would, it just worked...

Windows is an arcane construction that nobody really seems to understand. There's a lovely quote from the guy who started Linux, I'll post it if I see it again. There are plenty of people around who know how to work it to some degree, but it's a system that has been told to run itself, and it gets messy if you don't like the way it's doing it.
As you'd expect from an Open Source offering, Linux (and I'm sure other *nixes too I expect, but Linux is the one I have experience of) is much more transparent, in that if you're prepared to go looking you can quite easily find why things are like they are. It will not run itself like Windows will, but a certain kind of person (and they're much more common as you look in more technical fields) doesn't want things run for them if that means taking away their ability to make corrections and fix problems. But you do need to know what you're doing. The fact that I have little understanding of hardware seems to mean that I can be a Linux-type person only if I'm very careful what I try and run it on.

The cost of my escapade? One of the cheap (£5) cards remains in my Windows machine and I can see it coming in handy later on in this project (since I can use it to bypass all my tinkering on the local network, should that not go to plan). The other may be useful sooner or later. I only paid £10 for the one that works, after all. The major cost, had it been billable, would have been the many hours I wasted on the cards that simply didn't want to work.
A poignant and tangible reminder that the lowest list price isn't necessarily the lowest TCO? Priceless...