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.
A bargain DVD writer prompts Evil Steve to call Dr. Dave the cheapest man in the world. Dr. Dave replies that he willingly pays for quality, but not when a more expensive phone prevents him from installing the applications he wants: paying extra should mean receiving more, not less.
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A client assumes a laptop's wireless capability means it already has Internet access. Dr. Dave uses the misunderstanding to remind experts that nobody is born knowing the things they take for granted.
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A support call about Google’s playable Pac-Man logo and a disliked background experiment lead the brothers to conclude that users choose familiar interfaces for a reason and resist involuntary changes.
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Dr. Dave contrasts the excitement of receiving a new device with the hours of lost productivity often required to make it work. Because so little technology feels genuinely plug and play, he says the older joke “plug and pray” remains more accurate.
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Dr. Dave treats the confidential information stored by doctors, psychologists and financial professionals as a responsibility owed to their clients, while acknowledging through one difficult installation that protection has to remain usable for the person doing the work.
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After helping a grandmother protect a child online, Dr. Dave explains what he thinks about before making any recommendation: who is actually asking. Not everyone is a geek, so a tool has to make sense for an average person to buy and implement; the most technically sophisticated option may be the worse recommendation if it is too difficult to use.
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Dr. Dave rejects both extremes around data recovery: it is not supernatural, but a person who keeps experimenting on a mechanically failing drive can erase the very evidence a professional might have recovered.
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Dr. Dave compares two anonymous clients confronted by frightening infection demands, then recounts how another client apparently reached an imitation support service through a search advertisement. Across all three situations, he identifies panic as the attackers' leverage and urges people not to pay or take consequential action until they understand whom they are dealing with.
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Reacting to the Windows 8 preview, Dr. Dave accepts Evil Steve’s reminder that he values simplicity but refuses to confuse a stripped-down appearance with good design. Simplicity does not rescue something foolish, he says, just as complexity does not make something intelligent; good design lies in the convergence.
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Using RAID 0 as an example, Dr. Dave distinguishes a measurable increase in disk throughput from an efficient use of a customer’s money. He recommends improving the true bottleneck first, while acknowledging that video editing can be an exception.
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Dr. Dave compares uncritical enthusiasm for Twitter with the dot-com bubble, admits that doubting a popular trend can make him question himself and returns to his core test: he loves technology that works, produces and improves a life.
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Asked for his larger philosophy, Dr. Dave recalls advising successful companies that their culture or leadership might not support a sweeping technology change. He challenges executives who cannot explain why they are following the latest business trend and warns that an unnecessary revolution can damage operations, staff relationships and confidence in the very tools they introduced.
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Frustrated by conventional choices that had become complex and unreliable, Dr. Dave backs up and reevaluates his needs from the beginning. He says one of technology’s most important jobs is to make him significantly more effective, while time spent forcing unreliable tools to work takes something real away from his life.
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Dr. Dave and Professor Bruce use the familiar last-minute printer failure to explain why small-business technology must be dependable and easy: the owner earns a living through the work, not through hours spent supporting the tools.
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A complete caller exchange with a Juno/you-know joke, an offer of personal follow-up and reluctance to declare hardware failure before diagnostics. No successful repair is claimed.
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Dr. Dave describes testing in real homes and businesses, admits uncertainty and explains why seemingly identical computers behave differently. Brand examples support an important consulting principle rather than a promotion.
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During the Microsoft interview, Dr. Dave explains why he chose an old, underpowered laptop and deliberately tried bad drivers before trusting a major new operating system.
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Dr. Dave admits a simple reset should have been his first suggestion, not his last. Stories of supposedly dead laptops springing back to life lead to jokes about charging for the replacement a customer no longer needs.
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A wireless-network question leads Dr. Dave to recall a client who thought he was in the Twilight Zone because his computer powered itself on. Dr. Dave traces both situations to power-management and Wake-on-LAN settings.
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Dr. Dave calls consumers involuntary beta testers and says computers are not yet appliances, so useful operation still requires attention and willingness to learn. Continuing across the break, he uses written CDs to explain that a failure can come from media, speed or an unclosed session rather than the drive a user first suspects.
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Dr. Dave uses recycled virus warnings, a false Bill Gates speech and a fabricated Dell keylogger story to show how convincing Internet hoaxes spread. Even after checking Snopes, he still contacts Dell because no source is infallible, then asks listeners to verify unusual claims before forwarding them.
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Evil Steve asks Dr. Dave to make disk partitioning visual rather than abstract. Together they turn a physical disk into a record and then use a slice of the studio pizza to explain contiguous areas, sectors, data density and the different motion at the inside and outside of a spinning drive.
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Dr. Dave says product advice is not only about choosing what to purchase. What a person ignores and declines can make a larger difference in quality of life than the product eventually bought, so helping listeners protect their time and money is part of the service.
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A returning caller with a 386 asks whether to repair or replace it, prompting a practical explanation of repair economics, moving data and reinstalling old software, with sustained humor throughout.
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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.
