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 says experts routinely mistake what is easy for them for what is easy for everyone else, then evaluates software by whether a normal worker or grandmother can use it naturally and whether it stays out of the way.
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After the Toshiba interview, Dr. Dave says solving listeners' problems is what he does every day. His advantage is not mysterious: like an athlete who puts in extra effort, he wrestles with the technical problems others will not take time to pursue so he can help when listeners encounter them.
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Dr. Dave calls disciplined troubleshooting one of his greatest strengths, then admits that an intermittent amplifier still sent both brothers into the weeds. The breakthrough came only when they reproduced the same setup elsewhere and ran it long enough to see that the failure appeared after the unit warmed up—the test conditions and elapsed time both mattered.
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Dr. Dave explains how he evaluates technology for relatively unsophisticated small-business clients: he looks for tools that professionalize their work and deliver enterprise-level power without requiring an IT department, specialized training or a large budget. That search is how he first discovered LogMeIn and then watched the product evolve toward the people who needed it.
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After restoring the bunker network, Dr. Dave says his solutions do not come from brilliance. They come from experience, hard work and having already dug through a problem that he or a client encountered, a concise statement of how he built useful knowledge.
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After describing a laptop that rejected several apparently correct memory upgrades, Dr. Dave admits that unpredictable hardware can make even an expert look foolish. Evil Steve answers that expertise comes from having endured those failures, while Dr. Dave adds its practical duty: communicate honestly and tell the client up front what may go wrong.
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Instant search is powerful, but Dr. Dave warns that most online antenna plans were only mostly right and small measurement errors mattered. His own high-definition television antenna took perhaps fifteen minutes to assemble only after six weeks of comparing, rechecking and learning enough to trust the measurements.
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Dr. Dave explicitly recognizes that decades of Unix and Linux experience give him an advantage, so he has to filter his own positive experience through the fact that he does not represent the average person he advises.
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Support representatives and the manufacturer's specifications misidentify the wireless card in a client's new laptop. After wasting time on the wrong drivers, Dr. Dave removes the card, uncovers its FCC ID, traces the regulatory filing and works backward to the correct manufacturer and driver. He tells the story to show the real difficulty of his own recommendation, not just its preferred outcome.
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Describing an infection that most technicians would solve by erasing the machine, Dr. Dave says he cannot take that shortcut because he needs to learn how the problem works and explain it to listeners. He jokes about spending forty hours on a five-hundred-dollar computer because somebody has to push the envelope.
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Using a free utility as his example, Dr. Dave makes clear that price alone never earns a recommendation: free and expensive software can both be bad, and he recommends a tool because it works. The lack of cost is only the bonus.
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Dr. Dave describes watching a technical crisis unfold around his national show without being able to stop and ask what is happening; Evil Steve credits his ability to tune out the commotion, trust the team and keep the live conversation coherent.
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A WinZip update leads Dr. Dave to acknowledge how familiarity and personal bias influence recommendations, even when he tries alternatives.
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A client who spent hours repeating a once-successful migration finally calls Dr. Dave, who resolves it quickly and frames an essential consulting decision: recognize when the situation has changed and when another person’s experience is worth more than further lost time.
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Dr. Dave says the important measure of a provider is not perfection but how it responds when something goes wrong. Being able to reach someone who will take care of the problem matters more than imagining a competitor without mistakes.
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Dr. Dave argues that concealing a problem disserves customers and ultimately damages trust. A company can turn the mistake into an opportunity to shine by communicating honestly and solving it cheerfully, which he illustrates with the recurring help that kept him loyal to AT&T.
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A free utility looks and sounds promising, but Dr. Dave says he has not used it and therefore cannot recommend it. He contrasts that with software he has personally put through the ringer, which he will recommend ahead of a paid option when it is genuinely good.
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An HP order-system failure and Dr. Dave’s own IBM frustrations lead him to ask how much weight a consultant should give a few bad experiences, and to compare a company’s performance with realistic alternatives.
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Remembering clients who once insisted that every computer must carry a familiar corporate name, Dr. Dave argues that technology should be judged by whether it produces useful results—not by the logo, status or impressive appearance surrounding it.
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Dr. Dave says remote backup can be cost-effective, automatic and convenient, but it is not a panacea. His practical safeguard is not to rely on it alone: keep a local backup under your own control so one outside failure cannot leave you stranded.
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Dr. Dave separates four responsibilities that small-business owners often confuse: domain registration, web hosting, email hosting and website creation. They can be bundled, but they do not have to be; the owner needs to know who controls each one and retain every account credential, because letting an outside creator own the domain can turn an ordinary support problem into a difficult ownership dispute.
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Dr. Dave distinguishes choosing the wrong computer-maintenance tool from recognizing when a problem exceeds a person's experience. Knowing how to use a wrench or even a torque wrench, he says, does not make someone qualified to rebuild an engine; the value lies in understanding the whole job and when professional judgment is needed.
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Watching experienced balloonists, Dr. Dave notices that skilled work contains both nonnegotiable details and harmless imperfections; expertise includes knowing which is which, something a newcomer cannot see from the outside.
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Dr. Dave says he is not interested in change merely for its own sake. If a computer and its firewall are working and the owner does not want to experiment, the effective choice is not to fiddle; if someone does choose to experiment, time and a recovery plan should come first because any change can create a problem.
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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.
