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.
Dr. Dave warns that putting data on another company's computer always transfers risk, no matter how large or established that company appears. He points to surprising departures by Texas Instruments and IBM and gives the compact rule that a hosted copy can be valuable, but it should be a backup of a backup rather than the only surviving source.
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After seeing patched clients avoid a widespread shutdown, Dr. Dave says maintenance still requires time and money but offers peace of mind in manageable portions. The alternative is false thrift that waits for a major failure and pays much more while the entire organization is already in crisis.
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Discussing iRobot and a university research project, Dr. Dave praises a deceptively obvious rule: people do not buy a Roomba because it is a robot, they buy it because it cleans. Technology, quality and cost matter, but the work has to escape the laboratory and become something that produces a useful result in the real world.
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A surprising reliability survey gives Dr. Dave a chance to separate reputation from evidence. He says companies may benefit when perception becomes truth in the market, but an owner's lived experience ultimately matters more: a computer believed to be excellent still has a real problem when it does not work.
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Dr. Dave explains that accurate recommendations require perspective and honest assessment because the same limited machine may delight one person and frustrate another; blind Mac, Linux or Windows loyalty makes people miss those differences.
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After hearing another radio host describe technology frustration, Dr. Dave explains that dependence becomes crippling when people merely admit that systems break but make no recovery plan. He recommends backups, alternate connections and manual business procedures that preserve essential work during an outage.
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As offices consider moving from Windows to Macs after Vista, Dr. Dave says the real work is preparing users, applications, workflows, security and expectations rather than assuming a new platform eliminates problems.
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Dr. Dave says the technology business repeatedly finds a perfect mixture of publicity and novelty that sends weak ideas through the roof. Because even informed people can be swept along, he defines part of his job as giving listeners the straight story and bringing the claims back down to reality before they spend money.
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Introducing wireless networking, Dr. Dave says the technology industry talks so much about megabytes, megabits and pixels that it often fails to tell people how to make products work in their real surroundings. His priority is to translate specifications into practical decisions on the ground.
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Asked what technology had impressed him that year, Dr. Dave says exciting or glamorous products can be fun but his bias is toward practical fundamentals that genuinely make a person’s work, data and life easier. The short statement captures his consulting priorities without depending on one specific product.
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Dr. Dave explains how market pressure rewards software companies for adding features before proving their usefulness. He admires a developer's refusal to add anything that does not provide a real, productive improvement and warns that software bloated beyond reliability ultimately works for nobody.
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A website outage leads Dr. Dave to contrast the claimed cost of failure with the likely cost of a mirrored system, then reenact a familiar client contradiction: the system must never stop, but even a modest protection expense is rejected.
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Dr. Dave says data recovery can require exceptional skill, clean rooms and undocumented techniques, but that expertise should not be used to charge every frightened customer the maximum possible price. He describes the brothers' policy as charging according to the particular time and effort a recovery actually requires.
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Evil Steve recalls learning graphics on Macs at art school before moving to Corel on the PCs used for the show. Dr. Dave connects the experience to clients who need to produce professional work without mastering a huge program, then rejects the status attached to a fashionable tool in favor of the tool that makes a person efficient and productive.
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After a backup-software call, Dr. Dave warns that people often confuse a large company, a high price or a long-established practice with evidence that a tool will protect them; the consequences of that assumption are especially severe when the data cannot be replaced.
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Dr. Dave says he takes no pleasure in criticizing a company and would rather recommend one, but refuses to endorse a promising rewrite after only a first look because months of use can expose problems initial testing misses.
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A promising phone-and-dock combination leads Dr. Dave to a durable evaluation rule: specifications and marketing promise are rarely equal to the practical benefit discovered only after using the product.
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Asked how to choose an Internet provider, Dr. Dave gives one of his standing rules: required proprietary software is a warning sign. A special branded layer may promise simplicity but can consume resources, create compatibility problems and replace functions that open Internet tools already provide.
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After a caller asks how ordinary people can fight online scams, Dr. Dave explains that criminals exploit both greed and fear and increasingly hide behind innocent computers. He says protecting a machine is not only self-defense against stolen money or identity; it also prevents someone from unknowingly helping criminals attack others.
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Dr. Dave recalls clients believing that new security software caused a flood of attacks because its warnings made previously invisible activity visible. He patiently distinguishes awareness from cause and says the uncomfortable alerts mean protection is finally exposing a problem that had already been there.
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During the iPhone 5 launch, Dr. Dave explains that he deliberately remains half a year or a year behind the bleeding edge. He respects people who choose the newest device but wants cost, usefulness and the value of what someone already owns to guide the decision.
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Dr. Dave explains that the prior show’s failed phone system came from a connector that was not fully seated, admitting the mistake and laughing at the human tendency to imagine a major failure before rechecking the simplest physical detail.
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Because nobody can prepare for every theoretical danger, Dr. Dave recommends creating a hierarchy and addressing the threats that are most immediate, common, probable and damaging. The method turns an emotional security debate into a practical order of work.
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After criticizing a security software test, Dr. Dave says he has asked the publisher for its side and explains the standard he brings to the microphone each week. Listeners hear what he has experienced with real computers and real people, not merely results from a highly controlled laboratory.
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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.
