My sister's fiancee is shipping out to Afghanistan at the end of next month. He bought a Sony Vaio Laptop, desktop, and camera thinking they'd all work together seamlessly. He spent a couple of weeks of pure frustration trying to get it all to work.

My brother and I were over at my sister's the other night helping them get their computer stuff organized because he bought another laptop (older Toshiba) to take to Afghanistan with him. I spent some time networking the PCs so he could get files off both the sonys, and my sister's compaq onto his Toshiba for the trip while my brother messed with the toshiba getting it to talk to the 2 different cameras he's taking.

I got all my part done, and the Toshiba still wasn't talking to the cameras right. Turns out we needed several updates to bothe the camera software and Win98. Took several hours over the dialup at my sister's (wish we'd done this at mine or my brother's place!).

Meanwhile, Fiancee Dude is asking about my brother's powerbook. He asked why it cost so much more than his $1100 Sony. My brother said "We've been working on getting these damn cameras to talk to this toshiba for like 3 hours now, and it took you like 2 weeks to your Sony camera to talk to your Sony computers. I'll bet you a beer that i can plug your camera into my powerbook and have all it's pictures downloaded in less than five minutes." Fiancee accepts bet. I start my stopwatch. Brother pulls powerbook (new 15" G4) from his bag, wakes it, plugs camera in, powerbook almost immediately recognizes it, and he has all the pics downloaded. Took less than 2 minutes.

Fiancee wants a mac when he gets back.