DaveMason.com
ComputerTalk with Dave Mason
The official archive of all available ComputerTalk with Dave Mason radio shows. Spend some time with Dave. Listen to a full show or explore clips by topic.
3,475 unique clips. Each clip appears in one section. Historical conversations, not current advice. Full episodes remain available separately by date.
1414 clips, strongest first.
Thinking about what an Internet outage could make inaccessible, Dr. Dave pauses on what his data-recovery clients taught him: sometimes the photographs are the most important things in a person's life, more urgent to them than even their financial information.
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During a caller's question about software that automates driver updates, Dr. Dave steps back to define effective capitalism in human terms: make a living and make yourself successful by helping other people. He treats that mutual benefit as a real operating principle rather than a slogan.
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Dr. Dave says remote support is a dialogue with a person, not merely an interaction between a technician and a machine. Across two preserved portions, he explains that an office needs a patient participant who can locate accurate information, listen and communicate clearly, keep stress manageable and recognize that obtaining a timely result is a shared responsibility.
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Mike adds a thoughtful caution to Dr. Dave's earlier malware answer, and Dr. Dave openly credits the caller's point while adding safeguards and sequencing. Their exchange ends with the broader belief that technology is not effortless and users must accept some responsibility for maintaining it.
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A client knows that a manual backup routine will eventually be abandoned, so Dr. Dave designs an automated alternative: a low-heat solid-state drive inside a bolted safe, connected to a computer outside it and available to the home network. The story shows him adapting technology to the client's actual habits rather than prescribing a routine the client already knows will fail.
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Dr. Dave's son Nick, just ten, warns that a relative's new iPhone may not suit her needs. His dad admits he was right, then describes a store visit where Apple promptly replaced the faulty phone.
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What Dr. Dave expected to be a three- or six-month Linux experiment has quietly lasted about five years. By 2015 it is still on his primary laptop, supports his business and is running the radio-production computers during the live show—a concise record of how he tested technology in real work before endorsing it.
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A listener emails that Dr. Dave’s instruction to press two keys simultaneously is imprecise. Dr. Dave revises it to holding one key before pressing the other and says plainly that the listener is technically correct.
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Disappointed by unusable battery life in his new Palm Pre Plus, Dr. Dave tests his assumptions, asks for a replacement battery and discovers that the phone is dramatically better when the defective part is changed.
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The Sidekick failure reminds Dr. Dave of buying a phone for one advertised feature, spending a week trying to make it work and learning that the manufacturer had removed it without changing the manual.
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After declining to give Betty risky advanced repair steps on air, Dr. Dave explains that each Saturday he must shape recommendations around the knowledge and comfort of the person he is helping. This is not condescension; giving powerful information without considering the operator can turn help into harm.
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Dr. Dave opens with an apology for email problems and accepts that delaying his own hosting work was his fault. He recognizes the classic consultant's trap of being too busy fixing everyone else's technology to care for his own, compares it to the shoemaker's children having no shoes and decides that sometimes another task must wait so the overdue one can finally be done.
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Addressing Dr. Dave's son Nick on air, Dr. Dave recalls paying heavily for a MiniDisc recorder intended for interviews and candid recordings only to find core capabilities restricted by Sony's licensing concerns. The personal frustration illustrates how a company's content interests can undermine the device a customer bought.
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After deliberately committing to a netbook and cloud services for roughly three months, Dr. Dave reports that he tried to adapt rather than confirm his skepticism but returned because the available tools remained clumsy for the way he organized his days.
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When a frustrated caller considers several tools at once, Dr. Dave slows the process down, chooses one first step and explains why changing too many variables can make the real problem harder to find.
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Caller Tom argues that many people want a simple device rather than endless features. Dr. Dave agrees that keeping a computer safe demands too much time, then says buyers are effectively involuntary beta testers who accept unfinished technology because the world keeps moving too quickly to opt out.
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Evil Steve describes the original website as a place listeners could turn when they could not reach Dr. Dave live, with practical recommendations, a daily cartoon, a guestbook and direct contact. Dr. Dave says anything he recommends first has to work and notes that much of the useful software cost little or nothing.
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Dr. Dave initially avoids giving risky boot-file instructions until he learns that Ron has edited the file successfully before, then explains how hard it is to judge a caller’s expertise from the studio.
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Dr. Dave explains that mirrored drives can repeat errors and fail together, so redundancy does not provide the protection people often imagine.
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Jim is trying to revive an old Gateway before donating it. Dr. Dave admits what he cannot determine without the machine, works through the possibilities and suggests that even a difficult computer might help a charity train someone, while the brothers keep the long call light with jokes.
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Dr. Dave's son Nick calls back with good news: the troubleshooting steps worked. A Windows problem that had frustrated him for two days is finally solved.
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A report of failing hard drives leads Dr. Dave to contrast the low replacement cost of the mechanism with the potentially irreplaceable photographs and documents stored on it, explaining why capacity without reliability is not enough.
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Dr. Dave rejects absolute claims that Macs or Linux cannot be infected and tells a prospective buyer that a good platform still does not remove the human responsibility to notice what is downloaded and opened.
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The NVIDIA chip controversy prompts Dr. Dave and Evil Steve to explain how a hidden component supplier can damage the computer maker customers actually trusted, and why denial compounds the failure.
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Browse by year, then month, to find the episodes from that month.
442 proposed broadcast dates, plus 2 undated entries. Dates are based on archive filenames and may be approximate. Some broadcasts survive as separate parts or incomplete recordings.
