Kinda disappointed in my New Monitor experience...
 

Hey folks,

I'm just lamenting here. Feel free to ignore.

First, a little background: I am an on-site troubleshooter. I work for myself. People call me with computer problems -- mostly Windows users (not troll, just fact) -- and I go to their homes and home offices to fix the problems.

Of course, I see a lot of spyware/trojans/etc. Indeed, that's become a huge part of my business. Unlike some of my colleagues, I don't relish this. I still am in touch with that Sense Of Wonder I had when I was 10 years old in front of my Commodore 64. I want my customers to have that feeling, too. All too often, however, they're angry and frustrated, especially when it comes to malware.

Last night I had a long discussion with an incredibly frustrated father. He's spent hundreds of dollars on various techs to clean up malware. It keeps coming. In defense of myself, I was the last in a long line of techs that came, cleaned, and left. There was NO protection on the system when I got there, but that's not really the point of the lament.

This father was frustrated and very angry. He wanted a REAL way out. To be sure, this is one of a very few customers that wanted me to tell them ALL the options. When I utter the words Mac or Linux or 'dedicated Internet machine,' most of my customers start to feel like they're giving up too much and want a purely secure Windows machine that can't, under any circumstances, fall apart as they can. So, I told him about Macs and Linux machines and he was very intrigued.

I felt very comfortable, by the way, telling him about Linux mainly because I finally gave myself a dedicated Linux desktop a couple of weeks ago. I installed SuSE 9.2 and have had a very good experience. I've run into things here and there, but that was mostly due to MY screwing around than anything else.

But I was pretty disappointed today when I installed a brand new monitor. My wife and I bought a flat panel LCD. I hooked it up to my KVM switch which is going to two systems. One system runs Windows 2000. The other runs SuSE 9.2. I had no troubles on the 2000 system. The monitor displayed an image. But when I switched over to the SuSE system, the monitor displayed a "Mode Not Supported" warning. Both systems were on when I hooked up the new monitor.

I figured a reboot would allow SuSE to detect a new monitor and alter KDE's resolution settings. Unfortunately, though, that didn't. What I ultimately had to do was hook up my old monitor, mess around with KDE's resolution settings, then try the new settings on the new monitor. The problem turned out to be hertz.

So, the monitor is working now. It's a nice one, too.

But I keep thinking about my conversation with the father. How mad would he be if I advised him to get a SuSE-based machine and, later, he bought a new monitor and ran into a problem like this. Both Macs and Windows would have been able to take care of this, at least during a reboot. Granted his system would have no malware, but it would have no image either.

I just don't think most folks would put up with this.

SuSE should have been able to detect a new monitor. And if it couldn't determine the resolutions settings for this monitor, then it should immediately go to safe video settings that all monitors can display, regardless of vendor.

Cheers,

Mike...

In my experience, linux doesn't play well with KVM switches. Maybe Knoppix will...

Well, first off, the hertz (refresh rates?) are usually autodetected by SUSE. My golden rule with Linux computing is: if you can't get it working in Knoppix (even with tweaking) it probably won't work in Linux.

Windows part:

Rant:
Use a firewall. I'll say it again. Use a firewall. Use antivirus programs. Keep the virus definitons updated. Also run weekly (at least) Spybot Search & Destroy and Ad-Aware. Also, don't catch nasty IE germs. Use Firefox, Mozilla, or even Opera.

OK, I had this problem, my son's winme had problems, and I had to re-install, no problem there, but then when I hooked up the printer, it did not work, so being the good father that I am, I downloaded and installed the driver(they had lost the printer install cd), problem solved.
See where this is going?
My gf's sons have 2 computers that I had to work on, one was fixed without re-installing, the other had to be re-done. Guess what, they did not have their printer install cd, and win 98 and win XP did not recognize their printer. So being the good boyfriend that I am, I downloaded the driver and everybody is happy.
Just switch SuSE and Windows in your above post and we are back to square one. No OS will be able to detect everything.

I have to disagree a teensy bit.

In your examples, drivers were NECESSARY in order to run the device.

That's the not the case with monitors on any OS.