Windows Vista -- Now I'm Angry, Too
By kowalski Posted in Miscellanea — Comments (172) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
[Update: This is an apolitical post but since I had been a mild Vista enthusiast here in the past, I pledged that I'd report the bad along with the good. And this is about as bad as it gets.]
I tried to give Vista the benefit of the doubt. I really did. When I constructed my two workstations over a year ago, I thought I'd try to give Microsoft's new operating system a fair shake and an unbiased look without any MS-hating prejudice.
And aside from a few minor hitches, generally speaking Vista ran very well as both a 32 and 64 bit operating system in the 14 months I ran it, 24/7 on one machine in particular. I grew to like it. Having come from Windows 2000 without the benefit of ever having used XP, I was ready for something new and a little more fresh, and I actually liked the way Vista presented itself, and I enjoyed the extras in the Ultimate version. And the games look swell under DirectX10 with a fast graphics card.
So I wasn't a Vista antagonist until about 10 days ago, when it seized up in an unrecoverable fashion, and destroyed the hard disk drive of the computer it's running on, finally coming to rest in a permanent, irredeemable failure mode that requires a complete reformat and reinstallation.
Woe betide the Vista user who receives an 0x0000C1F5 STOP error blue screen on bootup. Apparently Microsoft has a problem deep in the bowels of one of its core file system drivers, CLFS.SYS, which handles the Common Log File System and is deeply tied to the NTFS disk management and hence, the entire operating system.
Microsoft's Knowledge Base article on this is unusually short and sour. That's because this is a *really, really bad bug* which affects every version of Windows Vista, and from what I have seen and learned in my research over the past 10 days, there is no way to recover from it.
CAUSE
This issue occurs because the Common Log File System (Clfs.sys) driver does not fix the $TxfLog file when the file is corrupted. In addition to the Stop error message, Windows Vista may not start during startup until the offending disk is removed from the computer.
Back to the topWORKAROUND
To work around this issue, use one of the following methods.Method 1
If you have multiple disks installed, and the disk on which the $TxfLog file is corrupted does not contain Windows Vista, remove the offending disk from the computer.
Method 2
If you have only one disk installed, and if you have access to Windows XP or Windows 2000 installation media, restart the computer by using the Windows XP or Windows 2000 installation media. Next, format the offending disk, and then reinstall Windows Vista.
Note Microsoft is working on a fix to prevent this problem.
That's it! You cannot boot from the DVDs, either. Read that again: if you put the DVD into the drive and attempt to boot, Vista STILL REFUSES TO LOAD and you die with a 0x0000C1F5 error.
Mind still reeling? Mine is, and it's almost ten days later. If you see this error message, not only can you not boot from the DVDs to repair the Vista installation, you have absolutely no other option than to reformat the drive and reinstall the operating system. This is because the $Txflog files are part of the NTFS internals and are *completely hidden* from the Windows API -- they cannot be repaired from within Windows, any version! And even when the system is asked to boot from the DVDs, it still attempts to interact with the corrupt files extant on the existing hard drive and crashes in exactly the same fashion.
It's going to take at least 6 hours to get my system back into a workable configuration. I'm still conducting more research into this issue but I suspect that it has happened as the result of an update that was pushed down to Vista machines in advance of the release of Service Pack 1. I say that because the number of forum posts about this particular, very rare error condition have grown exponentially since my machine left town about 10 days ago.
I think my next workstation is going to be a Macintosh. I've just about had it with Microsoft. It's inexcusable to produce a product that cannot even be booted and inspected by its own installation disks in the event of a serious problem, but that's exactly what we have here.
I use ACRONIS True Image 11 which is about the same thing as Norton Ghost.
I was an early adoptor of VISTA and I generally really like it. But I have gotten the Blue Screen of Death (BSD) 3 times since I installed it.
The first two times I got the BSD it took me about 16 hours each to reinstall my system and update all the software and get everything configured back to my satisfaction. And I lost some of my more recent data. After the second incident I found ACRONIS.
The third time I got the BSD I had my system completely back and running in about 45 minutes and did not lose a single important file. It was amazing. Absolutely the best $50 I ever spent. And the boot disk they give you will get your system running from the bare metal.
as a result of having two kids in college with computers I built. Between their wanderings on the internet and the way Windows operating systems seem to accumulate garbage, I spent way too much time reformatting hard drives and trying to save that really important term paper they forgot to back up to CD. That's when I found Ghost. With the boot disk, I could restore one of the kid's files in about 20 minutes. Now, I wouldn't dream of not using image backups.
BSD was a main branch of Unix before Windows ever existed.
---
Finrod's First Law of Bandwidth:
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it takes the bandwidth of ten thousand.
Whoa, sorry, brief bout of BDS, it's passing now. Liberals, if you’re not feeling well just stay home. Please don't bring your sickness into the work place and make others ill. (Had to bring some politics into this ;)
Sorry about that, back on topic, we, here at work have been testing Vista since it came out and cannot come up with ANY killer reason to “upgrade” from a business prospective. There are a few reasons not too, drivers, slower performance and incompatibility being the biggest. Yes we do have older printers, yes we have a few odd apps but we are not going to scrap perfectly good printers and mission critical apps for a pretty interface. In fact it doesn’t even play well with our Active Directory logon scripts that do nothing more complicated then install printers and map drives. Also Vista SP1 “upgraders” be on the lookout for the endless boot bug that got a friend of mine! http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/showpost.aspx?postid=2848906&siteid=...
It just gets better and better!
In a completely different note, Server 2008 has been pretty good so far.
Good luck on your recovery kowalski!
The only reason I can still type these messages is that I had the forethought to configure the machine to triple boot Windows2K Pro along with Vista32 and Vista64. At least Windows 2000 still functions...
Follow the light, brother. And I concur with General Confusion here. Somehow, some way, it's Bush's fault. Or it might be Darth Cheney in some sinister take-over-the-world plot.
Kill the terrorists
Protect the borders
Punch the hippies -- Frank J
It’s ALL Bush's fault, I watch the news your know. World Hunger, Bush's fault, Pestilence, Bush's fault, Poverty, Bush's fault, seeing the county through 9/11 and those successful tax cuts, Bush's fault, huh, what, er, I mean those brilliant Democrats...
(sniffle, sniffle, dang liberals, maybe I should just go home and get some rest!)
BDS, know the symptoms, seek the conservative cure!
Marie Osmond fainting on Dancing With the Stars, the fact that it took 15 years for the SS Minnow passengers to get rescued.
ALL BUSH's FAULT!
And there's only one sure-fire cure for BDS -- 3 hours a day, 5 days a week exposure to EIB.
Kill the terrorists
Protect the borders
Punch the hippies -- Frank J
Romo throwing that interception in the playoffs-Bush's fault. Patriots losing-grace of God. :-)
"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.Let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."-Barry Goldwater
McCain/Rudy 08-kill the terrorists and punch the hippies.
As much as I hate NYG, I was rooting for them like crazy to take the Cheating Cheaters down. Here I was just illustrating how BDS just makes a person loony.
Oh, and causing Terry Glenn to be out for the whole season - THAT was definitely Bush's fault.
Kill the terrorists
Protect the borders
Punch the hippies -- Frank J
Who want to conquer the world using Michael Jackson replicas...
"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up
Looks older than it is, and that's a good thing.
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
About a plot to conquer the world using Michael Jackson clones?
I was just referring to the Robot Chicken sketch of the same...
"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up
They Live, starring "Rowdy" Roddy Piper.
Ok, so they look like the Thriller version of Michael Jackson, but close enough.
This movie has -The Best Fight Scene Ever- in a movie.
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
Thanks, K!
Vista is junk...but I'm not going to a mac for sure. I built a server with Linux Ubuntu and its pretty neat. I think the next computer I build is gonna be run by Ubuntu.
"The conqueror is always a lover of peace; he would prefer to take over our country unopposed."
- Karl von Clausewitz
XP and Vista both suck. Each takes more control out of the users hands, a ton of ram, not to mention the fact that they are more susceptible to the Internet germs. Crash on either and your butt is cooked, get used to backing-up. Want to make some changes to the OS, dream on. I am still running ME, partitioned with Linux. Once Ubuntu becomes more software friendly I will make the complete switch.
Every app has its own interface. Mail, browser, file manager, music player, you name it: everything goes its own way. No standards, no consistency, total chaos.
You have to compile everything you want installed.
Plus, most of those apps expect to link to systemwide shared libraries to be installed separately, rather than including what they need and just linking it together. Your typical Leenucks app is like those awful MS Windows apps that dump their DLLs into the systemwide Windows directory.
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
and that's only with the live CD. It's good for machines without good hard drives, like the IBM P3 I have with a bad UltraSCSI drive in it.
Its really nice for dealing with machines with corrupted drives or no accessible drives.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
but only enough to see it work. I haven't really used it for diagnosis and repair. I haven't thought to use it on the IBM but I should do that soon. At least I'll know if the fault is with the drive or the controller.
They're both fine OSes, but they both lack any UI standardization, same as Ubuntu (and all the rest).
It's ridiculous that all these vendors let Apple beat them to the punch of a great Unix UI.
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
You want standardization ?
Apple has had the most rigorous human interface guidelines from day 1. If you ever tried to write a program for the original macs you quickly realize its either do it the apple way or it doesn't work
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
The Linux model lends itself to the insanity. It's digital anarchy by its very nature.
One of the things I neglected to mention about the corporations using free software is that it is never free. If there's a problem with an application (or the OS itself), you either have to try to fix it yourself or wait for the open source community to fix it. Neither are very good options when you're trying to run a business.
RedHat is the only one that's made it work, and they're more expensive than Windows or Apple.
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
Of course there's no such thing as a free lunch. Richard Stallman's Marxist delusions aside, the Internet reduces costs, but it doesn't change the laws of economics.
Free software is useful because it gives you the freedom to do what you want with it or pay someone else to do it.
And of course it works fine for a business. What do you think you're doing every time you pay Microsoft? You're paying them to add bugs and fix features (no, not fix bugs and add features, we know their track record by now :-)
The only difference with free software is that you're in control. You get to pick who you want to do your work; you have a competitive market rather than a monopoly on development. You also have the ability to fix things and maintain things that the vendor chooses not to fix or maintain.
Free software, for the customer, is strictly a superior model. You get all the options provided by Microsoft's model (admittedly pioneering from a business perspective), plus more.
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
SAMBA is a good case in point. It's never worked well enough to use it in a production environment.
I've never run into problems with Windows that didn't eventually get fixed sufficiently to allow it to run in a critical environment.
I've also found that it's the most forgiving of network glitches. Any UNIX get wiggy if the network is out for very long, especially if you're using NFS.
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
A smartly designed corporate system wouldn't be using it. Nor NFS for that matter. NFS was designed for mainframes on all the time.
These days I'd probably build based on Apple's new tech for file sharing, in place of SMB drives flying across the network.
You see, it's just a matter of a smartly run company doing things right from the ground up for long-term gains that accrue as everyone who uses the computers is able to work more efficiently and with fewer interruptions.
But American corporate governance isn't steered that way by the shareholders. Their loss.
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
R&D and Manufacturing like I support. These systems are on 24x7x365. NFS is still the best transport method for this type of work.
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
is that you don't have to wait for billions of dollars to be spent by the vendor before there's a product released. Next best thing is that the developers themselves and fellow enthusiasts are always on the forums and are much more helpful than typical tech support people.
If there's a problem with an application (or the OS itself), you either have to try to fix it yourself or wait for the open source community to fix it. Neither are very good options when you're trying to run a business.
Very small businesses have to do everything themselves anyways. Businesses of any size hire a Unix geek like me whose job it is to figure this stuff out. Note how at least with open source, you have the option of fixing it yourself; with Microsoft you have no choice but hope Microsoft fixes it eventually-- which isn't a good option either when you're trying to run a business.
---
Finrod's First Law of Bandwidth:
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it takes the bandwidth of ten thousand.
for more money to fix everything the Microsoft way. Open source solutions are much more pleasant to accomplish on the clock.
This is not true for a broad range of the most common Linux software. Almost everything I've ever wanted to install on my Ubuntu box I used the automated install process to do so. (From the command line, "sudo apt-get install foo" or use the GUI interface built into the Gnome desktop )
I can think of only two exceptions: Hamachi and TrueCrypt.
I voted early in the Florida primary. Find out who and why.
Everyone I've known who's used Ubuntu has told me over and over about compiling this, that, and the other thing.
(and never mind the stories of apt un-installing a hundred packages because of some obscure version conflict...)
But seriously, I know all about the Leenucks world. It's very hit and miss whether binary downloads are available. There are so many Leenucks-based OSes, and so many versions of each without binary compatibility with each other, that pretty much your vendor has to provide you the package or you have to compile it yourself.
I mean for crying out loud, the gcc people have broken their C++ ABI *how* many times?
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
...is that a friend of mine, with a Master's Degree in Computer Science, gave up trying to install nVidia binary video drivers on Fedora. At that point I realized I had no chance whatsoever, and gave up.
"No matter how much lipstick you put on the taxation pig, it's still a pig... and it's currently snout-down in your wallet." - Michael Fisk
That's nvidia's fault, not your friend's or fedora's. The fact that they won't play nice is purely their fault.
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
You're the first I've heard of. Maybe you're doing something with Linux to keep it in line.
I never said XP was anything great but it's stable and, after many hours of educating (torturing) myself on certain line-level issues (like what happens when you uninstall Netgear drivers and have a critical .dll renamed - this is the value of having multiple machines for internet access), I'm used to it enough to do what I need to do.
XP wireless networking is relatively painless, too; I still haven't gotten around to buying a router because ad-hoc networking works just fine. I know I'd use less electricity with a router but I usually need the primary computer on anyway when I'm using network machines, since I move a lot of large files that way.
My DOS base is more stable than XP and Norton will ALWAYS bring back up crashes.
Peer to peer? You are kidding?
and the only thing slowing it down is the fact that one of my adapters is wireless B and so the whole network slows to B speed when that's in use.
Corporations simply won't go through the pain of switching to another OS.
1. Not enough corporate apps work with Mac OS X
2. Most corporate apps won't run on Debian.
3. RHE costs more than Windows.
4. There isn't nearly enough trained support personnel in the world that can support any of these operating systems.
Corporations drive the application market, and for the foreseeable future they're going to be Windows apps. Microsoft will fix this barely-documented feature, and it'll be completely forgotten.
That is the world in which we live.
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
Many smaller ones do. But the big ones tend not to have the leadership.
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
...you'd see IT support businesses investing in the technology and offering it at a discount.
There are billions that could be made in this industry, but no one sees a reasonable ROI right now. The training curve for users & support staff is simply too great to overcome for a large corporation.
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
The belief is that it'd be too hard to train. And maybe with the leadership these places have, that's right, because they wouldn't know how to do the transition properly.
There are also transition costs caused by previous mistakes, when silly companies let themselves get sucked into vendor lock-in and would have to dig their way out.
And with the short-term thinking pushed by Wall Street these days, it's just easier not to be a leader and leave the problem alone, since it won't blow up today, will it?
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
I agree with what you're saying, btw. The costs aren't what they think they'd be.
If I had the money, I'd start up a business myself. I know that I could sell it. I could retire in five years after I sold the company for $1B+
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
with a concise proposal would be enough to attract the investment? They would at least see the enormous potential for your business idea as applied in the Arab world, where economical machines and proven OS's could really be profitable.
My reply was going to be "Get a Mac (nt)" when I saw the title, but you beat me in the last paragraph.
Is Apple perfect for the customer? Certainly not. Apple has certain areas where they're locking down control in order to maintain their cash cows.
The difference? Microsoft locks down data important to business. Apple locks down its display interface technology, and various media playing software (they even block iTunes from being dtraced). Nothing that most anyone would consider critical is under pressure, and in fact a lot of it is opened up.
You should like Leopard. The one thing about it I hate is Spaces, but you never used Desktop Manager (which used undocumented interfaces and stack insertions to work its magic, and naturally broke with the OS upgrade), so you won't miss what you never had.
As far as reliability goes, It helps when your OS is being built partially upon code from OSes that are expected to be able to run all day, every day, without fail.
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
...and Spaces is one of my favorite parts! But then again, I don't know what it was like before Leopard, so maybe I'm missing something...
So far so good on the Mac. The only frustration I have/had was last night when I moved about 30GB of MS Office docs from my old laptop to the MacBook Pro, and Spotlight proceeded to churn for several hours in the indexing process. The CPU was really heating up, and that was the first time I heard the fans kick into high gear.
I still have a server running XP Pro, and I plan to buy an extra copy/license for the next time I need to install Windoze. Vista? NEVER!
The Unofficial RedState FAQ
“You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say. ” - Martin Luther
all late-80's through mid-90's vintage. They're good for dedicated purposes but none of them will even make it up to OS8.
I thought about getting a decent modern Mac when the price is right because of a few applications that could really use it, namely ChannelStorm.
I agree on Spotlight. When I installed 10.5 my system was slow as I set everything up, because Spotlight was re-scanning my whole system! They ought to do something about that; it could really give people the wrong impression about the OS upgrade being a downgrade.
As for Spaces, it's broken by design. It's designed to be application-centric rather than task-centric. You assign apps to spaces, rather than tasks. This means if you're using the same app for more than one task, and want to keep each task on a different space, you're in trouble.
This happens to be something I do a lot. I might have two or more NeoOffice or Firefox or Preview windows open on space one with my iTerm for software development, some on space two because I'm doing some website stuff, and of course I have Red State and other general website reading over on space eight.
Spaces doesn't let me do that without a huge hassle.
Desktop Manager was much better, but it doesn't work on 10.5. No surprise; it does some black magic and depended heavily on 10.4-specific details.
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
Solid....Steady.....Reliable. Except for the occasional
kernal32.dll fault it's all good.
I'm personally on record as saying the two best OS's made by MicroSucks are.....DOS 6.22, and Windows 2000 Professional. Not that either is any thing to get excited about.
I haven't even THOUGHT of WFW in a decade. I do remember that starting with W95, for years I would eschew Windows Exploder™ in favor of File Manager.
Kill the terrorists
Protect the borders
Punch the hippies -- Frank J
except ME.
We even have OS/2 Warp and NeXT Step.
My brother calls Vista "Windows ME v2.0"
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
no, I meant GEOS.
I also wondered if anyone still runs TOS (GEOS-based) on an Atari ST. ST's are still the best MIDI sequencers you can use.
Atari TOS was based on Digital Research's GEM but it still looks like a 16-bit version of GEOS.
True innovation there, seriously. The basis of so much that's good in Macs today. There's a reason Cocoa uses Objective C, and all the class names start with NS.
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
You're right. They did drop the ball, and the article says why: they were fixated on copiers almost to the exclusion of the biggest idea since sliced bread.
Xerox dropped the ball on everything. There's a famous book about Xerox called Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer.
But I also think Xerox gets too much credit. Apple and Microsoft took their simple systems far beyond the vision of the academics at PARC. There has been a huge amount of work and invention since then.
that I didn't expect to be relevant to a thread. It's more evidence of the seemingly limitless capacity to improvise with a Commodore 64:
Someone actually crammed a multitasking OS with a GUI for the Intellivision, which has all of 512 bytes for RAM. That's bytes, not KB!
I remember tweaking that little bugger so I could play DOOM without any glitches (thankfully I don't have to use a serial cable anymore to play deathmatch!).
You want to be on the forefront of technology, you have to deal with things like this.
___________________________________
Two thirds of the world is covered by water,
the other third is covered by Champ Bailey.
It's very useful when rehabilitating an old machine and you don't have to worry about copyright issues or any technical issue you might have from "Dos 7.1" (which was extracted and distributed by "the China DOS Union" and can load from 2 floppies):
They also have a Sourceforge page though.
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
and my older ones run 98se or WFW 3.11, depending on their capacity. I've still never run Windows 2000 Pro on any machine but I do have a disc for it. Every time I used Vista on friends' machines, I didn't like it for aesthetic reasons. I appreciate the warning against buying it.
...in my case, it was a faulty RAM module that was bringing the error up.
Other than that, I've actually been quite happy with Vista (to the point where using XP on my work computer borders on drudgery), but recognize that it is not without its faults, some of which I am able to overlook simply due to having rather new hardware (2.8 GHz Athlon 64 dual-core, 2GB RAM, GeForce 8800GTS). The biggest improvement in my eyes has been the steady improvements in application compatibility from patch to patch, to the point where there is very little (if anything) I own from my years of work on Windows that doesn't run in Vista.
"No matter how much lipstick you put on the taxation pig, it's still a pig... and it's currently snout-down in your wallet." - Michael Fisk
I tried the "reseat the RAM and the hard drive cables" fix and I also ran the Microsoft Memory Diagnostic several times from the triple-boot startup screen. I even attempted removing half the memory and swapping the modules around -- no luck. And the system runs perfectly in Windows 2000.
I also tried every conceivable combination of F8 boot options on both the 32 and 64 bit partitions and the error is the same. I reset the BIOS to factory defaults (not that I had even tweaked anything that much) and the condition was the same. I've put about 10 hours thusfar into trying out all the options I've heard of.
I even opened a ticket with Microsoft and had a lot of words, some not so nice, with their people in India and there was nothing more helpful from them.
This machine has expen$ive ECC server DRAM and it has always run flawlessly -- in fact I feel safe in saying that it had been unusually stable for a Vista machine in the entire time I ran it. It ran everything I threw at it with very few exceptions, and I enjoyed using it.
That's one of the reasons I'm seriously disappointed. The blooom goes off the rose when you can't even boot from the installation disks.
assume the lotus position, and rely on Vishnu for insight on how to kiss the machine goodbye?
They're falling down on the job.
But it was mostly out of frustration, and I can say that the guy was one of the *sharpest* tech. support people I've ever experienced from any call center, anywhere. He was smarter than most of the CS students I've met here in America, and I'm sure he's getting paid all of $5 an hour.
The real problem was that he just didn't have anything good to tell me.
And neither does Microsoft.
And neither does any one of the experts I've consulted online.
And neither does anyone else.
So it's not his fault over there in Delhi. I'm still looking for Dana Groff's email address at Microsoft because he was responsible for the integration of the Common Log File System into NTFS and the World's Leading Authority on how it was supposed to be the The Revolutionary Windows Vista Transactional NTFS (TxF) Infrastructure.
It's so revolutionary and transactional that you can't use the machine when it fails! And you can't even boot from the installation disks! And nobody has any answers!
It's kind of like that bad link in the previous message. Here's the real one. And it's only kind of like it, because you can get to the page through a wide variety of other methods, including hitting the backspace key and removing the quote in the URL.
NO SUCH LUCK with the 0x0000C1F5 STOP message. There is no backspace key for that problem.
into another vista machine that's operational as an extra drive.
because I have had Vista for about a year and no problems, makes me think I am due.
I got no way to really back up all my info, maybe just some of it.
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle
Nobody likes being forced into spending more money but maybe Carbonite or a similar service is a good idea for anyone running Vista.
Was Democrats using MacOS X, Republicans using Windows, the Green Party using Ubuntu, and Libertarians using OpenBSD.
Guess that's a moderate.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
...and I have been using it on Windows too. I still like Firefox better but it is not bad either.
Wubbies World, MSgt, USAF (Retired):
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("An argument is a sequence of statements aimed at demonstrating the truth of an assertion.); }
doesn't hang, as mine is wont to do on my primary machine. I find I'm not alone and that other people have been told by the Mozilla forums to just get more RAM, but a P4 with 640MB should not be inadequate for a web browser. It's almost as if Firefox turned into what IE used to be, even as IE improved.
I have been running beta 4 its great so far
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
I might try that. I got some minor update today which doesn't seem to have changed anything.
I also just found a link for XP SP3 Release Candidate 2, but I don't think a service pack is something for which I'd want to take chances with a beta.
...a lot of problems with memory leaks. I love FireFox and use it as my primary browser, but the memory leaks are the main contributor to the hang problems. I have them too.
In FireFox 3 a big improvement on the memory leak issue has been solved and is a much more stable browser with much improved performance so far. It is still in Beta so I am waiting for the final release.
Wubbies World, MSgt, USAF (Retired):
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("An argument is a sequence of statements aimed at demonstrating the truth of an assertion.); }
If I had the equivalent of the NoScript Firefox extension on Webkit, then I'd ditch Firefox forever, since GreaseKit already gives me Greasemonkey-style page rewriting.
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
Any good add ons? I can't live without my add ons.
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Two thirds of the world is covered by water,
the other third is covered by Champ Bailey.
The plug ins have worked fine
There are some interesting changes in the way the bookmarks work. I was upset that I couldn't just copy bookmarks.html over to the new system.
Upside is that the memory leaks are history.
Speed is improved as well.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Breaking now? So does that mean I can have my ad block with FF3? No memory leaks would be nice.
___________________________________
Two thirds of the world is covered by water,
the other third is covered by Champ Bailey.
Apparently they haven't bothered to do any compatibility checks.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
The Dems can have MacOS X -- we did everything Windows does first and better, unfortunately nobody believes us or cares.
But I would hope the Repubs were Ubuntu -- more efficient, faster, more stable, open architecture - as an analogy to the free market, unfettered by govt overhead.
The Green Party can be DOS 3.2 -- regulate all the progess, good features, and innovations out of Windows, and strip it down to the point where you have a command-line interface (only), 32 MB maximum hard drive - an analogy to CAFE, Kyoto, and other govt efforts to 'save the environment' from AlGoreHell.
Libertarians - yes, UNIX, that's perfect.
In my perfect universe, nobody loves Windows.
Kill the terrorists
Protect the borders
Punch the hippies -- Frank J
So you associate the Republican party with a movement to collectivize the manufacture of software and end intellectual property rights? That's curious.
We're more like Slackware: rugged individualists.
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
So you are telling me that MS and Mac model the free market BETTER than the Ubuntu project?
Kill the terrorists
Protect the borders
Punch the hippies -- Frank J
a downgrade back to XP.
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
...last year when Vista came out, I bought 6 Dell workstations with Vista Business just to shake the system out and test out how it played on my network, and how our software installations worked with it.
It generally played well with Group Policy and Active Directory, though a few glitches were encountered. A specific example is that a vast majority of my users do not have software installation privileges by way of denying them the ability to make changes to the Registry. This Group Policy also still allows them to map to printers over the network. However, that is not the case with Vista! No registry changes = no adding printers!
I can go on and on, but I won't. The bottom line is that I am about to convert those 6 machines to Windows XP and hang on with XP until I am forced to change the operating systems. Then when I do, I think I am going to be going Linux or Apple. I won't be going Vista that is for sure.
I am already looking at Apple options and I like what I see. I have two Apple servers in my possession and I am about to bring them on line to start the process.
This post only reinforces my experiences with Vista.
Wubbies World, MSgt, USAF (Retired):
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("An argument is a sequence of statements aimed at demonstrating the truth of an assertion.); }
The lack of CHM support is murder. Just breaks so many apps its not funny. Plus I can read my books.
When I last moved I had a laptop die in the move. I had immediately replaced with a unit on sale at compusa ($350 after rebates), Even after upgrading to 4 gigs of memory and popping in a 4 gig ready boost drive it was still slow as heck. Did the work replaced with XP its been excellent.
I have an HP convertible that after the memory upgrade, the ready boost drive, performs acceptably. Then again it was far too much money for acceptable.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
I was a researcher at Microsoft 8 years ago -- but also worked 11 years at Bell Labs, where UNIX was invented. It's been disapointing to see the missteps leading to Vista's poor quality and delayed release. At least two VPs were fired over this, but too little too late. The major reason for its delay was a bad initial plan that had to be scrapped mid-way, causing a lot of work to start over.
MS used to have a culture of three-way checks and balances. Developers wrote code, testers challenged the code and looked for bugs, and program managers acted as the customer's advocate and designed or criticized interfaces. In the more burocratic Microsoft of today, the PMs seem to have too much power. And of course, like many large companies, there are too many brainless vice presidents running around randomizing everyone.
Anyway, I am waiting for SP2 or possibly even Windows 7 before I change again. I just built a new 8-core machine, and I just put XP x64 on it. XP is a fine system, and I haven't seen a blue-screen in years with it.
is it true that Windows M(iserable)E(xperience) was released prematurely and solely to cover the costs of the anti-trust lawsuit?
No, ME was released because XP wasn't ready in time. So they put together one more release of the "9x" codebase.
Microsoft had two completely independant operating systems -- Windows 95, and Windows NT. NT was a server/business OS. Windows 95 was a smaller system for desktops, meant to be rapidly churned to support games and rapidly evolving new features and standards. 95 was fertile ground for games and applications, but you pay a price in system stability when you make so many changes so rapidly to a complex system.
Windows 95 evolved into Windows 98 and then ME, by which time it was something of a trainwreck. NT evolved into Windows 2000.
Windows XP was the NT kernel redesigned to permit all the crazy Windows 95 games and applications to run, without actually letting them do the dangerous things they did in Windows 95. That was a very difficult software engineering feat.
and I guess that's why so many people like Windows 2000 Professional so much because it succeeded NT.
ME following 98se seems more like a horrific mutation than an evolution for that series. Every ME machine I've encountered was a magnet for spyware; in fact, more than once I've found in excess of 1000 pieces of malware when cleaning up a ME disk.
I bought a 98se OEM CD a few years ago for $40 from an Amazon reseller and that's actually been money well-spent because any time I get another hand-me-down computer, which is often, I know I can always put 98se on it in good time and see if the machine will handle XP.
Yeah, Windows 98 SE was the high point for that code base. I never used ME, I knew better.
Micosoft has a strange internal culture for a corporation. Programmers can leave a project and "interview" with other groups almost any time. There are thousands of programmers there, of course, but there is a pool of a few hundred truly amazing programmers (level 13 or level 14) who migrate to where interesting things are happening. By the time ME was written, the Windows 9x team probably had none of those hot shots left. XP was where the action was by then. A level 14 programmer at Microsoft gets compensated about a million dollars a year, btw. They are that good, but most programmers are nothing close to that in ability.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Yes, SP3 is supposed to have a lot of performance optimizations. I'm looking forward to it.
I have Vista and usually lack the time to back my stuff up.
"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill
It runs in the background while XP is running. In fact, I'm backing up my hard drive as I type this message. Since it saves an image of the drive, all files and settings are saved.
It's one thing for all you gurus to discuss, its another for the rest of us. Something is wrong when the average user experience isn't getting much better/easier. I damn near need a guru monthly just for personal use. That's not what I imagined from a super successful company such as Microsoft. Do/did customers really matter to the company or is it all about control?
Ask not what I can do for my country, ask what my country can do for me. Washington Elected Elite
You want a gazillion more features, and you want 100 different ways to do something, but you want the system to be less complex.
It won't happen.
People will need to be able to do more of their own system administration in the future, not less.
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
when computers were expected to work right out of the box and actually did in the 8-bit era. Apple's closer to that than any major player these days but it's still not as simple as it used to be.
One great example: I have a Yamaha CX5M made in 1984. It's an MSX (Microsoft's first attempt at open standards) 8-bit computer that's made for music and has FM synthesis and MIDI ports built in. I turn it on and the cursor is waiting for me when the tube lights up. I type "call music" and hit return, and I can immediately use the musical keyboard that goes with it. 10-15 seconds from powering on to accomplishing my task.
Althought it DID take a 1/2 hour to load a game....
As for today's computers, they are (sadly) corrupted by BLOATWARE. Back in the day, programmers used efficient code. They had to because of their limitations. Nowadays, they don't care because they assume that everyone runs out and buys a new computer every 2 years.
I used Windows 95 until 2004 and I was happy with it. I only upgraded to XP because of compatibility issues with newer technology.
I will continue to use XP on all 3 of my machines until it won't work anymore. I often suspect MS is working hard to make that happen within the next few years so I have to cough up more $$$$.
May God help us all if they go to a subscription-based OS. I think the only reason they haven't done so yet is because they know that if they do, someone will come out with a Linux distro that average people can actually use without reading and digesting a 300-page manual.
Commodore 64 rocked! I loved all the random games it had. I learned how to type on one too.
"I ain't never votin' fo another Democrat so long as I can draw breath! I'll vote for a dog first!" - Leola Thomas
Paul Slocum is an artist, musician, programmer and hacker in Dallas, TX. He and his girlfriend are in the band Tree Wave and he also makes and markets cartridges for Atari 2600 and Commodore 64:
EASY FIX - but first an introduction. I have been angry with the dolts at Redmond since the theft of the MAC Desktop and renaming it Windows. Since then, every product of the company has either been stolen, or otherwise taken over by some kind of force.
Tiny minded supporters of m$ have called me every name in the book, most commonly: "Jealous" which is immature and absurd, and "disingenuous" which is also absurd, and judgmental.
m$ products just plain suck.
Here is how to both get your lost files AND have a groovy new working OS; Get a free copy of Knoppix, and burn it to CD (using a friend's machine perhaps). Boot the offended computer with this CD. Attach a USB hard drive to it and copy off your important files. OR, insert a DVD (if the machine has a DVD burner) and copy them to the DVD.
Once this is done, use the CD of Ubuntu Linux that you also previously downloaded and created for free from: http://www.ubuntu.com, and install a REAL operating system. This will come complete with a real browser (Firefox). You can also use a REAL email engine (several in fact) such as Thunderbird. AND, it has Open Office inside too. This little gem will do what m$ Office cannot. It will create robust documents that m$ Office cannot read. At the same time, it will read, alter, save, and anything else you can imagine, to the same m$ Office documents that you don't need in the first place. In other words LINUX IS BETTER AND MORE POWERFUL THAN REDMOND CRAP! ! !
It is time the world shut m$ down, and used reliable (REAL) products. Mr(s) Gates and Ballmer know this too, which is why they have snookered former rival Novell into giving up SuSE Linux so they can control, and ruin it like they have everything else they have gotten their stunted, greasy, grubby little hands on.
Yes. I am a hater of all things m$ !
...Bart PE with a few nice Utilities to replicate the Explorer Interface. The I just "Copy and Paste" the files.
I Have Knoppix STD in a bootable disk too. It comes in handy for emergencies.
Wubbies World, MSgt, USAF (Retired):
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(""The only reason that some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory."); }
How is Ubuntu for the average home user not into tweaking the system all the time? Primarily email, internet, printer compatible, wireless router compatible, itunes.
What are advantages/disadvantages? Faster boot, better performance, more stable?
Ask not what I can do for my country, ask what my country can do for me. Washington Elected Elite
I use openoffice.org, firefox, and thunderbird now. Love em!
Ask not what I can do for my country, ask what my country can do for me. Washington Elected Elite
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
Assuming no prior experience, it'll be rough. Well, because first off, the user has to choose between GNOME on Ubuntu or KDE on Kubuntu, but either way, you're not going to get every app intergated with the chosen environment.
Which means the user is constantly having to re-adjust how to use his computer from app to app.
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
Email: My Ubuntu install came with some email client pre-loaded, but I use GMail most of the time anyway.
internet: I'm guessing you mean "web" here. Firefox, pre-loaded with Ubuntu, for the win.
Printer compatible: This can be tough if you've got a printer that's not on the list of commonly-used printers, but Ubuntu uses the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) which has drivers for most major printers. You may have to select the "most compatible' driver if yours isn't expressly listed. In my case, I found Google to have the answer every time as to which driver to choose.
Wireless router compatible: Again, built-in, and in Ubuntu, the interface is fairly reasonable. Although some early betas had buggy implementation. If you can set on up in Windows, you're probably fine. Wired routers are no trick at all.
itunes: I don't know that iTunes is available for any Linux distro but there are gobs of Linux-based alternatives for playing and organizing music. There's one on my Ubuntu box but I don't play music on that since it's got no sound card.
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I can unequivocally say I will not be running for national office in four years.
- Barack Obama, 11/04/04
I have a PowerBook G4 for personal use, run an Ubuntu Linux box at home for a backup/file server, and reluctantly use Win XP in the office because that's what my partner uses.
I really love my Mac. And, in the span of the last six months, my sister and my father both switched without any pushing on my part. Both love the Apple product - especially my dad.
Is Apple perfect? Not by a long shot. Is it *much* better? Try it for yourself and see.
I voted early in the Florida primary. Find out who and why.
One of the more curious facts about having grown up programming on a TRS-80 Model I is that I also used the first Macintoshes, before they became a cultural phenomenon with its own intangible correlates and all the cultural assumptions that go along with them. I thought the Mac was a visionary machine qua machine when it was first made, even though the original Macintosh was mostly vision, less substance. At least, it was less than I needed when I had to work with spreadsheets and interface with mainframe computers and write programs to do production work. It was beautiful, but it was also a beautiful toy at the time.
Now that Vista has tarnished its image with me, I'm willing to give them a second look, after all these years. I don't use computers because of their cartoon factor -- I use them as tools, for the purposes of work and leisure. Maybe a Macintosh is a better machine now. I'll give them a serious look.
Hardware - You pay a premium because Apple seeks to make things work reliably.
Software - Worst case, you can use X11 on Darwin on Mach for everything. This gives you an interesting hybrid: You have a known, stable configuration of hardware and OS that people can build binary installations for, taking full advantage of the Bundle system and Mach-O format to produce portable universal binaries that include all necessary libraries.
So in short: You get all the advantages of unix without the disadvantages of Ubuntu I listed elsewhere in the thread.
Best case, you use a wide variety of native Mac apps, which bring even more advantages of integration and consistency, thanks to Apple putting more emphasis on such matters than any other graphical OS vendor ever has.
No tool as complex as a computer will ever work quite as well as a hammer. But an Apple is as close as I've ever seen.
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
Honestly?
________________
Thou art the Great Cat, the avenger of the Gods, and the judge of words...-Inscription on the Royal Tombs at Thebes
Ubuntu? Assuming by 'PC' you mean your typical Intel/PCI architecture, yes.
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
but yes Intel/PCI architecture. I know that there supposedly are hacked versions out there and people who have made it work on a virtual machine, but I am talking about out of the box software for a regular PC.
_________________
Thou art the Great Cat, the avenger of the Gods, and the judge of words...-Inscription on the Royal Tombs at Thebes
Mac OS isn't designed to run on any combination of hardware you throw at it. That defeats Apple's goals and everyone's assumptions of stability and consistency.
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
_________________
Thou art the Great Cat, the avenger of the Gods, and the judge of words...-Inscription on the Royal Tombs at Thebes
Right now the linuxes are in the cryptozoic. All kinds of strange forms and odd variants. At some point there will have to be a die off or all the evolutionary lines will go.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
It's not the number of vendors that's the problem. It's that not one of the vendors is willing to take a stand and start writing some standards, then ensuring their product obeys them.
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
There are no standards or rather its the old joke
"The nice thing about standards is there are so many of them"
One way or another most of the current flavors have to go away.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
If one, if even ONE, would sit down and write some UI standards, the rest would probably follow because it'd get adopted by X.org or something.
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
Posix is at best loosely implemented
file locations library versions the almost impossibility of distributing a binary install or the iffy nature of compiling a program due to library dependencies.
I like Linux, but the uncertainty is a killer for me.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Back in 1996, my now-wife, then-girlfriend had a Mac laptop. I trash-talked her mercilessly about it.
But back then, Macs were as bad as my manners.
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I can unequivocally say I will not be running for national office in four years.
- Barack Obama, 11/04/04
When Apple switched over from the IBM processors to Intel chips a few years ago, I knew a guy who was crooning over his new PowerMac and I said:
Yeah, I'd like to have one of those and one of the new Opteron PCs, both fully loaded.
He looked at me like I'd mixed the meat and milk at a Kosher dinner and exclaimed with a flourish: "Why on *EARTH* would you want BOTH?"
Well, he obviously took the Macintosh to represent something a little different than I did: to me, a computer isn't a symbol of anything. It's a tool. And may the best ones for the job win.
Thanks for the *basic* memories, Kowalski ;)
I haven't been in exactly your shoes, but anyone who has used a microsoft product for more than six months has experienced a frustrating letdown or two when their shiny new machine craps out with some sort of MS-based error. I feel your pain.
Before my fancy-pants, $4700 dream-machine's mainboard hiccupped, (sending it back to the manufacturer twice and still in testing across the continent - 6 weeks and counting) I was running dual-boot XP/Mandriva 2008. I had experienced enough of what you're going through (even with relatively-stable XP) to want an alternative to MS. (I actually looked forward somewhat to Vista, and even sat through the MS marketing-disguised-as-continuing-ed presentations in order to get a free copy. Got too scared to put it on my 'spensive mochine after reading tens of horror stories from early-upgraders.)
Since I had just dropped almost five large a mere two years ago on a PC notebook, switching to Mac wasn't an option. I thought Linux might be a great way to guard my investment by safeguarding my data, reducing the threat of viruses and spyware, and give me all that pretty eye-candy I got that great graphics card for in the first place.
So, I searched around for awhile through the various Linux forums and tried a couple of live distros, including Knoppix and Ubuntu. I have to admit to feeling like I was in a bit over my head, at first (and still feel that way at times) even though I consider myself an intermediate-to-semi-advanced Windows user. But I settled on Mandriva, for purely girly reasons (I thought it was prettier than ubuntu) and actually bought the powerpack ($59). It walked me through partitioning and installation very well, and was operating smoothly (with proprietary drivers! and beautiful 3D GUI!) in a little over an hour. I loved the dual-boot configuration because some games and genealogy software were easily accessible on the Windows drive and most everything else I used was on the Mandriva one. Seamless until the hardware failure.
The frustrating two months since my "baby" got "sick" and having to use my daughter's little Vista laptop stands in stark contrast to those heady days of speed and luxury. The feeling of being in over my head is now more of a sickening realization that no matter what I do, Vista simply isn't good. After reading your situation and the MS forum on the subject, I am grateful I had enough bad experiences with Automatic Updates to turn the service off before the inevitable happened. (Also making me think about reverting daughter's laptop to XP or dual-booting it, too).
Hopefully, your (and others) experiences will motivate MS to make sure updates are stable before unleashing them on an unsuspecting public.
You have my sympathy.
I wouldn't turn off automatic updates, though.
The only thing that I wish is that if it has occured as a result of an update -- or anything else -- Microsoft would release a fix that would let me at least boot the damn thing and repair it, because there's nothing wrong with either of the two Vista partitions except for something that got scrambled by CLFS.
The thing that galls me is that this is probably a very minor problem with a very complex chain of causality, resulting in a massive failure.
It reminds me of the "for want of a nail" story. The kingdom can be lost, and my sincere hope is that they can find a way to correct the problem and offer people who have had it some kind of recourse other than wiping out their entire systems.
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
1. Try rebooting. If that doesn't fix the problem...
2. Reinstall the application and your backup data.
I have yet to find a support center with the depth of knowledge and willingness to work a problem to resolution as Microsoft's. No one else even comes close.
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
The killer was they would put you on hold. My take was that they should have offered either phone sex or legal advice while you were on hold. At those prices it was criminal not to.
This isn't to ding M$ alone. Novell used to do the same thing it was so bad at one point they had Novell radio as their on hold music. You could email or fax in requests.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
It's always been a flat-rate charge per incident since I started calling them.
What I NEVER got from them was the runaround, finger-pointing, and failure to resolve the problem like some other companies. My favorite closing line from them was always,
Is there anything else I can help you with?
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
IF you have a back up of the drive, an image or the like, and you don't mind having to wipe the disk you can do this:
1. On start up press F?? (it's different on all computers) to bring u to the Boot Setup / System setup.
2. Again it varies alot but find something within that menu that resembles Boot sequence/order.
3. Take note of the order u'll need this for when it's fixed. Then using your space bar de-select everything except your DVD/CD drive this should have a No.1 next to it.
4. You need to find a program called 'Wipedrive' (i think it's by White Canyon) it can be purchased/downloaded from the internet. (you'll need another computer for that...Lol)
5. insert the CD and restart the computer, it'll bring u to a DOS looking screen and follow the instructions. I only wiped it once but u can do the 3 times wipe if you want.
6. Once finished remove the wipedrive CD and put your operating system disc in, then restart.
7. This will reinstall a fresh copy of the operating system.
MAKE SURE ONCE IT'S ALL REINSTALLED GO BACK AND REVERSE STEPS 2&3.
You don't have to use wipedrive, there are other utilities that will work, the disk just has to be bootable.
HD manufacturers generally have such programs for free on their websites under technical support downloads. The low-level format zeroes out every byte on the HD. Best is if you can get a DOS-based one that will fit on a floppy disk or one that will boot off a CD (if you have a way of burning the image file).
Alternatively, does Windows Vista have a recovery console that you can load onto your hard drive from the installation disks? (WinXP does) This would be a separate installation from an attempt to reinstall the program - on the XP installation CD one of the first questions is whether you wish to repair an XP installation (answering yes begins installation of the recovery console).
If you can install and boot to the recovery console, then unpartition and repartition your disk, and that should hopefully wipe out the offending corrupt files.
Of course, you'll lose all your data on the disk, but I gather you'd given up on recovering that already.
If you're in a pinch, contact me and I'll e-mail you an old Maxtor/Quantum DOS-based low-level format program that you could try.
I'd install a backup HD, boot a Leenucks CD with NTFS read support, copy the data off, and then go buy a Mac. Or heck, just installing the Leenucks you booted would work better.
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
Hit "ENTER"
Cry and buy a new HD because you just broke it forever...
"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up
because the hoops I was going to have to go through to get a new laptop with XP were not worth my time and money. But I do nothing on the play laptop except surf the web and do web email, generally when "watching" TV. I doubt the corp. I work for will EVER support Vista on its 300,000+ laptops and I won't ever upgrade to it on my others. Vista on my new laptop is ok because I do virtually nothing with it and make no demands on it. Oh, I did try to peek at the Quicktime movie of the new RedState 3.0 and it hosed the machine totally to where I had to do a hard reboot. Vista is the Yugo (or the Pinto) of OS's. But for the price, my new laptop would be a Mac! My next one really may be.
You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
It didn't help that the preview file was massive.
Did you try do download it or just view it by clicking on it?
Fighting for conservatism one day at a time.
I just got my daughter a new Lenovo laptop and I was able to get XP. No hoops. I just had to pay an extra $70. Given everything I've heard on VISTA, it's probably the best $70 I've ever spent. Of course she will still probably forget to back up the machine and update her anti-virus definitions and I'll be playing PC doctor, but I least I'll be able to fix the problems.
...I don't understand why MS thinks the ever-increased processing ability of computers should immediately be taken up by its product. And not because the product is better, but because there's a few more bells and whistles (I can watch a tiny movie in the taskbar! Hooray!) and a lot more fat on the coding. I have Vista and Microsoft IE kept crashing when I went to a site with Flash. Or sometimes for no reason at all. No such problems when I switched to Firefox. So, it won't solve the diarist's problem, but everyone should switch to Firefox.
It may just be that I'm using a piece of junk Acer laptop, but Firefox seems to get hung up an awefull lot. I do like the customizing that you can do.
Fighting for conservatism one day at a time.
Firefox is a tad slower on mine as well. But a tad slower is much better than having IE "fog out" and have to restart (or just completely freeze the computer) every 30 minutes.
Imagine what it does to us poor saps who don't know RAM from ROM, much less SDRAM.
Microsoft has become Chrysler: a once-great company now struggling to make products that people want.
Proudly supporting John S. McCain for President (McCain/Romney?)
Microsoft was never ever an innovator or a producer of great products. Microsoft's innovations and success all came in the form of how its business was run.
Bill Gates was an early leader in the world of strict copyright controls on software, and between that and some resourceful work taking advantage of other people's code to grab the IBM-DOS opportunity, he made his fortune that way.
From there it's been all about creating lock-in.
Good products never came into play.
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
While Wordperfect, Lotus, etc. were all staying as far away from each other as they could, Microsoft came along with inferior, but functional products that integrated well and won the day.
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
That is, if you look over the long haul.
I really like Office 2007 after getting used to the changes. There are some really nice features that aren't available from Open Office.
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
getting better all the time!
Story here.
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
It wasn't in a few minutes. Actually the contest went a whole day without anyone even trying, becuase nobody had any remote hacks.
They don't even tell us what the user of Safari had to do for this to work. It's all so contrived and pointless.
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
Responsible hackers don't release the vulnerability details until the vendor has had a chance to release a patch, unless the vendor is unwilling to address the problem.
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
The last major "Mac vulnerability" included a user having to download, unpack, and run a program.
In other words it was user failure, not software. We have no way of knowing if this one was the same.
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
But the point is still valid. They're not going to release any information until Apple has a chance to evaluate it and make a patch available if necessary. I wholeheartedly agree with that strategy.
"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson
That is why I won't buy any Microsoft operating system until it's been in use for at least 4 years and why I image my drives (Norton Ghost) at least once a week.