ALLGBMINI

[feel free to ignore this post!]

So far this year I have collected a whole heap of new technology bits & pieces, including my TomTom which is slightly MINI related so let’s start there …
When I looked at the various navigation options, I eventually selected TomTom because it is well reviewed, has a nice large display and a clear user interface. I chose the top end TomTom 700 because (a) I like gadgets, (b) I planned to get a new phone and liked the bluetooth / hands free idea, (c) the “ASN” mode sounded useful when losing the satellite signals and (d) having all of USA mapped at once seemed much better than needing to load up various sections depending where you are.
More recently I did get a new phone, the Motorola RAZR, chosen partly because it is compatible with TomTom.

TomTom & RAZR happily talked bluetooth – but TomTom was next to useless for hands-free! I could hear people but they could hardly hear me using the microphone built in to the TomTom base. Maybe I’m just unlucky, but a listen only telephone was no use to me.
I tried to figure to get TomTom to just display the caller ID, but it insisted on taking over the speaker & microphone so after a week of failed experiments I gave up.

Also, the “ASN” function of TomTom is hopeless. Driving in the Boston / Big Dig tunnels, TomTom has no clue where I am (because the roads are different to its map data). When it loses the satellites, it seems to randomly place my car and hop around from road to road as time goes on. There does not seem to be ANY possible intelligence like “I was on that road before, so I must still be on that road or one that connects to it”!
I have lost satellite a few other times too, when the map data is correct, and still “ASN” decides I am leaping from road to road with no logic – from my experience, “ASN” is useless.

Finally, having all of USA in the TomTom is much more useless than useful, because whenever you want to enter an address, it comes up with similarly named places all over the country – and there are very many places called Essex, or whatever! It is somewhat smart in that it normally lists recently visited places early – but not smart enough apparently to list nearer places first if.
On a related subject, the POI (point of interest) function is often almost useless because the displayed names don’t scroll – so you key in (for example) “Circuit City” and it displays maybe 10; but they are all called “Circuit City” and it doesn’t have the display room to tell you which town each one is at – so you have to guess and pick one; then it figures a route to it and finally you get to see where it is and whether it is the one you wanted … if not, start again and try a route to a different one (just make sure to remember which ones you have tried already).

If I was doing it again, I’d get the less expensive TomTom – or maybe I’d find out if any of the other models on the market are more “real world useful” …

OK. How about:
I bought a new PC, a powerful “PowerSpec” with dual Athlon cores and lots of other “go faster” stuff. I also bought a nice Apple flat panel monitor to go with it, and a new Logitech bluetooth keyboard / mouse (thinking the bluetooth could make uploading to TomTom easier).
Well, the Apple monitor regularly “crashed” – it would ignore all its buttons, so you couldn’t adjust the brightness or turn it off/on. And it wouldn’t turn off when there was no dsplay – the backlight stayed on permanently (although of course there was nothing being displayed). I finally swapped it for a Samsung monitor which works fine.

Much more of a nightmare was the Logitech keyboard/mouse. Once I installed it, my brand new superfast PC would hang during boot for about FIVE MINUTES, doing nothing at all. Then eventually it would finish booting. But the mouse wouldn’t work for about 10-20 seconds more.
I searched all the Logitech help/support but found nothing, sent an email to them and got no reply, and eventually tried uninstalling – immediately my PC went back to the orignal fast boot. And it was also running much faster!
My suspicion is that the fancy new Logitech software doesn’t work properly with dual core, causing the long hang at boot-up and maybe forcing the PC to run as slow single core.
Thankfully, TigerDirect accepted the Logitech return without question … oh, and Logitech eventually sent a support reply about a week later – but with no helpful info!

My last tech nightmare is the HP 7310 All-In-One printer/scanner/copier/etc. It connects direct to the network, easy for my wife & I to share, and has great features like a “scan to” button on the front that sends a scanned image to a PC.
But for five days, and countless attempts, I could not get the HP software to install. It would get to 96% and hang. Or it would finish but the scanner was inaccessible. Or everything would be OK except the “scan to” button didn’t work.
I bounced back and forth with HP tech support – they at least replied quickly but their suggestions got more and more crazy (with no improvement); their last suggestion (which I did not try) involved deleting links to drives and “my computer” from my start menu!
Currently, the printer works, and the scanner normally works if accessed from the PC. The “scan to” button doesn’t work, and the HP drivers often cause my PC to fail to access the Internet for about the first 30 seconds after boot up. But it’s the best performance I’ve had so far from HP, so it will do!

So next time you experience a spurious “SES” light on your MINI, or that slightly annoying acceleration stumble, or a hesitancy for the auto transmission to shift, or too much DSC when pulling out and turning a corner … be thankful your MINI works at all! It wouldn’t if Logitech or HP got near it 😦

Let them eat cake!

Too Much Technology

Messing with perfection