I admit to liking gadgets & all things shiny & electrical but does anyone ever get things working as the manufacturers indicate they should. I seem to spend half my life fiddling with settings—-Bluetooth devices that won’t connect, phones that run out of memory & require you to jump through hoops to get them to work as they should, GPS’s that won’t connect to bluetooth and can’t hold a compass calibration for more than 10 minutes, Anything computer oriented (Vista—Aaaaarrrghhhh)-the list goes on. I do research before I buy but it always seems the same!

Most people want the moon on a stick. Accept that nearly everything is imperfect and you become a lot happier

RTFM

I always RTFM-front to back!-atlaz, possibly got something there, bit of a perfectionist!

Don’t be so reliant on technology.

If you have RFTMed and still break it all then PEBKAC.

More serioulsy: all this modern kit works wonderfully well if you use it in the way the designer intended. So if you understand what it can do and respect this it is very unlikely to go wrong. However if you want to do something a bit different then you don’t just need to understand what it does but also a bit about how it does it. That way you know what boundaries to respect and which to push.

A very basic example is the error saying your phone is out of memory. This is because you tried to save to many things to your phone. This is a boundary you cannot cross!

all this modern kit works wonderfully well if you use it in the way the designer engineers intended.

Designers should know better and design for the ways in which we work.

I understand the not pushing boundaries bit but it still seems the average consumer needs a lot more technical knowledge than the manufacturers would have you believe. My phone for example allows apps on an SD card but won’t update without moving to phone memory, updating then moving back to card-forums are full of people recommending rooting etc, way beyond most people’s remit(especially mine!)

You can buy Apple stuff – by no means perfect, but a lot less grief than other vendors (although I still find XP to be the most stable OS I’ve come across yet).

I understand the not pushing boundaries bit but it still seems the average consumer needs a lot more technical knowledge than the manufacturers would have you believe. My phone for example allows apps on an SD card but won’t update without moving to phone memory, updating then moving back to card-forums are full of people recommending rooting etc, way beyond most people’s remit(especially mine!)

should have bought an iphone then. even my dad can install apps…