How long will you spend trying to solve a problem that isn't that important?

[jasc15]

I was wondering if there was a way to download a website to access offline.  A friend told me about httrack, which lets you do just that.  Great!  I love the internet, and the people who have spent so much time solving highly specific problems and shared them for free.  So I get to it, and learn a little about how it works, including downloading sites that require a login, which was the case for the site I was interested in.

It required setting up a temporary manual proxy in my internet settings, and getting the IP and Port numbers from the httrack program.  Well, it spits out something like this

fe80::393f:dcd6:35be:6c08

which doesnt look like an IP address to me.  Well, now I'm reading about IPv6.  Can I translate from that to IPv4?  Not really.  I need to disable IPv6 from my network adapter.  But that's not sufficient.  I need to uninstall IPv6 capability for this program to really work properly.   But I can't uninstall, so I try logging in with the admin account, thinking that would allow it.  Nope.  So now I do some more internet searching and find a solution that creates a registry key to disable IPv6.  That won't work either, and the program still spits out IPv6...

So now I'm like 5 or 6 levels away from my original problem, which is to download a website.  I've spent about a day on this, and there are more important things going on at home.  At what point do I give up?  At what point would you give up?  I know there is value investigating problems for its own sake, and learning things along the way.  But the learning potential here isn't looking very promising.

[millahh]

Well, I got my PhD, so I'd say that my threshold for working out unimportant problems is about five years...

[Darkstarshades]

Is answering to this thread one?
Because, if so, a good while.

[Chino]

I used to have no problem spending hours trying to solve a meaningless task or problem. The older I get, the less I care.

[Stadler]

I'm with Chino.  It wasn't meaningless when I was younger, it was new information and a new way to solve problems.  Now I have too many problems that have NO solution that I can't really spend time on meaningless one's that do. 

Then again, what's "meaningless" is sometimes relative.

[wolfking]

I used to have no problem spending hours trying to solve a meaningless task or problem. The older I get, the less I care.

This.

[Implode]

Depends on the issue. If it has to do with programming, I'm the type that'll spend hours trying to figure out why something isn't working if I want it to. I'm also the type to spend a couple hours making a program to do something automatically with the push of a button when I could've down the task manually in half the time.

[hefdaddy42]

With this specific issue, I would turn it over to my wife, who is in IT.

If it's a problem that isn't important IN GENERAL, but is somewhat important TO ME, I may spend some time on it.

Otherwise, very little.