Why can't I find stuff anymore?

It's really discouraging to me that I can't find stuff on the Interweb
anymore.

I used to be one of those guys you could go to for solutions to computer
problems. I could find what was needed, assuming I didn't already have
whatever it was.

I don't seem to be able to do that anymore. For one thing, I don't have
my BBS anymore, so I don't tend to have vast varieties of files and
programs lying around. For another, it seems web search engines just
don't work as well as they used to. Do a search for just about anything,
you'll get a whole stack of ads for buying something allegedly similar to
what you were trying to fix. Then you'll get a stack of links to "link
farms," sites that claim to have the file or info you're looking for. The
rest of the results will have nothing to do with what you're searching
for.

I bring this up because I went to a rummage sale and bought a cheap little
digital camera for a quarter. The guy'd lost the driver disk for it,
though. So I went on the Google and searched and searched, and didn't
find workable drivers for it. Then I went to Yahoo, same results, none at
all. Finally found a technical discussion forum, with an extended thread
from a bunch of folks who also hadn't been able to find drivers for the
same camera. No drivers, though.

Shouldn't bug me that much -- it was only a quarter after all. But hey, I
used to be able to do this stuff all the time! Now, it just doesn't work
anymore.

By the way, I put up a picture of the camera on the blog website (swiped
from that technical forum discussion I found). If you recognize it, and
have drivers that would work, I'd appreciate it much. I'm stuck.

The other day, my sister started having problems with her laptop. So she
took it to a shop,`rather than have me try to fix it. They had it for
three weeks, thought it was a virus (it wasn't), decided it was a hardware
problem (probably not, since it worked fine under Linux) and finally
disconnected her internal keyboard, sold her a USB external keyboard, and
sent it back. I fixed part of what they screwed up while they "fixed" it,
but she doesn't want me to fix the part that was broken in the first
place.

On the other hand, I'm not so sure I could fix it. I don't have the kind
of confidence I used to have about such stuff. The computer world has
moved on without me. Oh, well.

--
grizzly at grizzly dot podzone dot org
Grizzly's Growls Podcast: The Life and Times of a Minor
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