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Sam may well be correct.

There was a great article in a recent British computer magazine in which the publisher did an expose of computer repair shops in England. The fault they created was unseating a RAM bank in a laptop!

incidentally, the article said only one of many shops fixed it without doing anything wrong. Some shops fixed it immediately, then said the customer needed a new motherboard. One charged for a new motherboard but did not install it. And several shops went on to look at passwords, bank account numbers, and erotic pictures that were planted on the laptop. The test included software that turned on the camera when the computer was booted, and recorded what happened. Not very reassuring.



"EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT COMPUTERS I LEARNED IN SELF DEFENSE"

There were/are two reasons for this. First, when I began trying to create music with computers I quickly realized that no one in a computer store knew what I was talking about. (Ex.: Me: "I'm looking for a General MIDI soundcard. It has 128 voices." Sales weasel: "This computer has voices. It has voice recognition, too." Etc., etc.) Things have improved in the hardware department, but these days no one knows about music software except manufacturers and other users. Do your homework, people.

The second was that I was first infected by a virus in a repair shop, before I was ever online.* The tech was honest enough to explain that he kept viruses around for research. He never did adequately explain why his disk was in my machine. I have had a deep distrust of computer techs ever since (and have experienced the same when working on others' computers.) That's when I began to learn to build and repair PCs on my own, to the point that I got my A+ certificate.

My advice to others: The thing about a Personal Computer is that You are the Computer's Person. If you're going to use it as a musical instrument--and you are, if you think about it--you should get at least as good at it as you are on your 'real' axe. You'll still run across situations you can't handle, but you'll be better equipped to explain them when you have to, and to evaluate the results when you get it back.

I wish that it was otherwise, but everything points to any use of a PC outside of running name-brand vanilla software in business applications as being a hobby. Unless you have purchased a top-of-the line purpose-built name-brand unit, once you start installing audio soft- and hardware, it's down to you and your fellow hobbyists to get through it (and sometimes not then, as we occasionally see).

R.

* (The second virus was acquired via software bought at a yard sale.)

"My primary musical instrument is the personal computer."