A degree isn’t worth more than the piece of paper it is printed on; it is, instead, the application of said knowledge that the paper implies which gives it value.

I had a two hour long call the other night at work.

I do Tech support, by the way. For notebooks.

Anyway, I got this older gentleman on the phone and we started talking. He has an issue with his TV Tuner card: It won’t work the way it used to.

I pulled up the troubleshooter for tuner cards because I don’t know much about them, and quickly set to work trying to fix his issue.

The long and short of it is that we had to uninstall the drivers, re-install the drivers, and then use it in QuickPlay. Thing is he wanted to use it in Windows Media Center. That’s fine, we’ve got a thing for that, too. I actually tried to walk him through that before QuickPlay because that’s what he was wanting to use. However, he kept getting an error, something about needing an IR Control Cable.

The IR Control Cable connects to the back of the Cable box or satellite box and lets your laptop change channels for you. He didn’t have one of those, though.

This wouldn’t normally be a problem, I’d have told him, “Sir, you need that cable in order to use that with Windows Media Center.” and that would have normally solved that situation.

A little back information: He’d once sent his laptop in for service at one of our Repair Centers. When he got it back, he set the system up just like he had it before. Before he sent it into us, Windows Media Center worked just fine for watching his TV Shows without that IR Control Cable. Now, however, that he got it back, it no longer worked.

I have no clue why it won’t install/work properly in WMC without the IR Control Cable, but I do know that it’ll work in QuickPlay without worrying about it.

So I got it working for him. The guy was really nice, too. He used to work for Intel making the equipment that checked the chips. He did maintenance on them and such. Even though I had a headache by the end of the call, I was pretty happy with the overall conversation.