Last month I inherited an old laptop – an Averatec 2100 for selling which was to be put on Craigslist and sold for a few bucks. Well, it didn’t work out that way. It’s been a journey and I think eventually this thing is bound for the dump after all rather than going to a needing home.

It all started innocuous enough with a new computer being bought to replace this the Averatec. The Averatec is going on 3 years and it was actually quite useful for the person who’d used it mostly for email, web surfing, basic image editing, writing and little more. It’s small and lightweight, albeit a bit underpowered. When the call was made to ‘dispose’ of the machine, I offered to reformat the drive and reinstall Windows because that’s the main reason the machine had started to slow down and feel like an overweight sludgy snail. I figured re-installing would have been easier than selectively wiping data off and uninstalling apps and try to get the machine to run at reasonable speed.

Big mistake!

The issue is that the machine never came with any disks. Everything was – and I emphasize WAS – online and was meant for download if needed. Of course when the machine was bought everything was pre-installed so nobody thought of actually downloading the driver or recovery disks from the Averatec site which also was a big mistake.

Windows Key don’t work

I started with a reformat and reinstallation. No disk – no problem. Download the MSDN Windows XP Home Basic, start installing and use the Windows  key from the bottom of the machine. But immediately it became clear the key from the bottom doesn’t work even though I was installing the same version of Windows (XP Home Basic 64 bit). Apparently the difference is that this was a more recent version (Home Basic with SP2). I called Microsoft’s support number and the tech insisted that the key on the bottom of the machine was not valid downright accusing me of piracy. Thanks dude. Nice! Now I’m a pirate for re-installing Windows. Fine. I have other unused licenses of XP Home I never used  – so screw you too! Eventually (after two more tries) that worked.

Drivers oh Drivers

Next problem: Some drivers didn’t auto-install. Most things came down fine, but others didn’t. No video (ATI Drivers aren’t on Windows Update?), Wireless drivers (Broadcom fairly standard drivers either). Ok, that’s annoying but as long as you can figure out what hardware’s in use it’s not too bad to download drivers from the hardware vendors.

So I managed to get most things installed and got the machine functional with one exception: The Audio Driver. Could not for the life of me figure out what hardware is in the machine and no driver to install.

So as I mentioned the computer came with no CDs. So I went to the Averatec site which is absolute crap. That site has drivers for sale on CD, but not for the 2100. Averatec is also a subdivision of TriGem and they actually have a drivers download area, except – you guessed it – they don’t have drivers for the 2100. They have 1100 and 2200 downloads but not 2100. WTF? Nowhere is there any contact information on either of these sites. Nothing. No links, no phone numbers, no automated email nothing. Well, not true after digging around for about half an hour I found an email link (that I can’t find again now) that hinted at support questions. I emailed, but wasn’t disappointed when I didn’t get a response.

So after fucking around with this machine for a bit by using the 1100 and 2200 drivers I was actually able to get everything to work except for the Audio driver. That was two weeks ago and I’m still driverless. Without audio drivers this low powered machine which is useful for little more than Web Browsing and typing letters to Aunt Maya is basically worthless – not something I’d even want to give away to somebody. A Web machine with out audio is kind of pointless.

BTW, why is it that Audio drivers are sooo problematic on machines? If there is going to be a problem on any machine you install it’s most likely to be an audio driver. I’ve had Dells which I tried to install on Win 2003 and the one thing that never worked were the damn audio drivers. But the real issue with audio drivers is that the don’t auto detect or provide any information about themselves. They always show up as Unknown Multi-Media device, rather than the make of the device. So even if the manufacturer might have drivers figuring out exactly what the damn driver is painful.

Driver Sites Galore

While searching for drivers one thing that really struck out was that there’s just all sorts of commercial bullshit getting in the way in search results. If you search for Averatec 2100 Audio Drivers you get a mouthful of sites that claim to fix just about any computer driver related issue. You get everything EXCEPT the actual Averatec site.

After I had mucked around with this for some time I was about to give up. Via Twitter several people recommended some of the driver download sites like DriverAgent.com  and Driver Detective. I was hesitant at first because this is obviously hardly worth putting any money into. But after the hassles of trying to find a driver I figured a few dollars are cheaper than the time it had already taken me to get this far. Checked out the sites, but predictably they too failed to identify the audio hardware so they couldn’t make a driver recommendation. No go.

Other sites promised to provide full driver disks but most of these seem very shady at best. I actually broke down and tried to get a driver from the people at User-Guides.co.uk which looked no less shady but at least sounded like it would provide everything I need in one place. Well that site sucks too – it’s been 5 days and I still haven’t been able to download the drivers. I spoke to tech support and they claim a backlog and they will refund my money if I choose. I don’t hold up much hope that they’ll have more luck finding drivers than I have. Apparently these people build their own configuration/driver disks based on the specified computer. But of course there’s no mention on the site of this – they make it sound as if the disk and drivers are ready to download. Perfect example of a predatory business…

Predatory and just bad Business Practices

And that’s really what I got out of this experience: There’s so much crap out on the Internet and so much trash that is aiming to confuse, obfuscate and take advantage of people any way they can. This is nothing new and it’s easy to say – you gotta be careful where you go and who you give your information to (the order at User-guides was through PayPal – no way would I have given these folks a credit card!). Most of us as computer professionals are aware of the malice that exists on the net and if something looks even slightly shady chances are pretty good that it really is and a good sign to stay away.

And that’s all fine and good until you get into a situation where you really need something – like this damn audio driver for an Averatec 2100. Ok I don’t really need it, but by now this has become an obsession that has gone beyond any value proposition and I know it <s>. It still irks me to throw the computer away vs. trying to pass it on to somebody less fortunate so I would like to get this one small missing piece for this machine so it’s not a complete piece of junk.

Further it’s sad that a company – Averatec or TriGem – would be so callous as to not put the drivers onto their Web site. The TriGem site is complete piece of shit anyway and the driver portion of that site is actually broken with the fancy Javascript lists not actually working and depending on which browser you use not even be visible. But even forgiving that, why would you not publish the drivers for ALL machines you’ve ever sold? How hard could it be to get that online and keep it there? Apparently these drivers where available at some point in the past when drivers where found on the actual Averatec site (as opposed to the TriGem site) but since then – nothing. Insane.

Ok, I would have never bought a machine like that since it’s clearly a cheaply made consumer level machine and stuff like this isn’t entirely unexpected, but it still makes you wonder about how our resources and supply path are spread out all over the world and over different work and business ethics.