I spent nearly an hour downloading Microsoft Office Plus 2010 after purchasing and Firefox stopped responding. The download had reached 621MB of the 650MB. Eventually I found a hidden dialog box asking me to update Firefox to 3.6.11. I clicked the button to "Ask Me Later", but Firefox still was not responding. My only choice was to kill Firefox which I did.
Firefox restarted and I chose to restore the previous session which it did. Finally checking the download manager I found it was back to downloading the Office download at about 285MB. It quickly completed the download successfully in 5-10 minutes.
I've grown used to clicking on a link in an email message and receiving a "fatal error" message from Firefox only to find Firefox wants to update some totally unrelated add-on. Performing the update gets Firefox to finally start. However, interrupting a 650MB download for an update is totally unacceptable. Mozilla, the Firefox developer, along with all the software development community have got to get this update madness under control. Each piece of software seems to think their software is the only software installed on a computer and must be updated immediately regardless what the user is doing.
Last week proved to be incredibly annoying. It was Micro$oft Tuesday and they wanted to install a massive number of updates. In the midst of the M$ mess, Adobe Reader decided it needed to be updated immediately. Then Norton Internet Security wanted to update from the 2010 version to 2011. When this happens on a weeknight while trying to update five (5) home computers and all your trying to do is read your day's email, it becomes overwhelming.
So what do you think? Has this update madness gotten out of control and do software developers need to change their paradigm on when to tickle a user to update?
Showing posts with label norton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label norton. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Restoring the Dead - Windows XP Pro
Well yesterday I decided to go for it and wipe out and restore from scratch the computer that had been my primary computer since mid-2003 until October 2008. It was running Windows XP Pro with 2 GiB of memory and a 320 GB SATA drive. Actually it has 160 GB and 80 GB IDE drives installed too that are disconnected.
The Windows XP Pro was eating itself. File ownership seemed to have been corrupted which caused programs to not install properly. Devices such as the LeadTek PVR had long ago stopped working and the Dazzle Digital Video Creator 80 (DVG 80) recently quit working. The DVG 80 was really the last straw since without it I couldn't capture the videos of my granddaughters. Heaven forbid!
In addition I had tried to just re-install Windows XP Pro on the disk using the slipstream disk described below. This resulted in a half pregnant install where each boot asked to run setup or boot to windows. The default was to run setup which resulted in a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). The problem was created by a virus called Norton GoBack sold by Symantec as part of my Norton System Works 2006 which I could not uninstall by itself or with the entire Norton System Works deinstall and Windows said I could not complete the install unless it was removed. Complicating the issue was that I have my WinXP Pro machine sharing a monitor, keyboard and mouse through a KVM with my new Vista 64-Bit computer. With the KVM there was the risk that while I was booting I might not be there to select boot to windows rather than run setup and then BSOD.
Before starting, I decided to "slipstream" my original Windows XP Pro 2002 all the way up to Service Pack 3. To get instructions for this I Googled "slipstream xp sp3" and found the article "How to slipstream windows XP Service Pack 3 to Create an Integrated XP Setup Disk with SP3" at HowToHaven. I followed the steps in the article blindly, but carefully to create two XP Pro SP3 install disks, the extra one just in case the other one didn't work.
To start the re-install process, and remove any doubt whether I wanted to do this I removed the primary partition, created a new one for the entire disk and formatted it as NTFS. To do this step I used the Live version of Gnu Disk Partitioner (GParted 0.4.5-2). Live GParted is Linux based and boots up from a CD quickly. What a nice simple program to use and very similar to the last version of Partition Magic I used years ago. First step, success.
Then I tried installing XP Pro. It booted to the CD and looked like it was going to go smoothly, only to fail when it said it couldn't find any hard disk installed on the system. Another quick trip to Google revealed that Windows didn't recognize that I had SATA support and I needed the to download the drivers to a 3-1/2 inch floppy and use them early in the install process. I went to the Asus web site and downloaded all drivers for my A8V motherboard. One of them had a make disk utility for doing what I needed. That's when I found that coming by a 3-1/2 inch drive and finding a disk for it was no simple feat. Found some old Linux boot disks and other stuff and tried formatting and making the disk in my wife's HP desktop running Win XP Home but it wouldn't do it. In a panic I decided to break out my old Windows 98SE laptop and see if it could deal with the 3-1/2 inch floppy. First thing it told me was the disk was locked which was probably why my wife's computer couldn't do anything with it, but it was too stupid to tell me.
The second attempt installing XP Pro with SP3 went pretty smooth. Pressed the F6 key when prompted and inserted the 3-1/2 inch floppy to load the SATA / RAID drivers. Holding my breath until the prompt came up asking for my product key into which I entered my original product key and in about a half hour I had a "working" Windows XP Pro computer again!
Fixing the network setup (it wanted a dial-up connection?), was a first step and then quickly re-installing Norton Internet Security 2009. These steps went very smooth.
I created some accounts and decided to end the day on a success and would install all the other stuff later.
The first thing I noticed this morning was that the video was honked up. Dragging a window would cause it to be redrawn slowly. I looked at the Device Manager and the video device had a Yellow Question Mark indicating it didn't know what it was, and had decided to use a generic VGA driver. There was another Yellow Question Mark indicating there was another unknown device. Opening the case and pulling the card revealed I had a eVGA e-GeForce 6200 AGP card with 256 MB DDR memory. I went to the evga web site, downloaded and installed the latest driver. Sure enough that fixed the problem with the video.
After that, I thought I would install the LeadTek WinFast Multimedia Software Pack which hadn't worked for a couple years now. This fixed the second Yellow Question Mark and now all the installed devices seem to be recognized.
Next I installed Nero 6 which came with my Pioneer DVR-710 DVD recorder. The drive itself seems to have been recognized during the Windows install.
Well, the Dazzle Digital Video Creator 80 along with it's MGI Video Wave 4 software seems to have installed okay. When I plugged the DVC 80 into a USB port Windows recognized it, loaded the drivers and said it's working properly. That's great news if it's true.
I am amazed at how much software I had installed on this computer:
Well I'll be off the rest of the day, installing and rebooting.
The Windows XP Pro was eating itself. File ownership seemed to have been corrupted which caused programs to not install properly. Devices such as the LeadTek PVR had long ago stopped working and the Dazzle Digital Video Creator 80 (DVG 80) recently quit working. The DVG 80 was really the last straw since without it I couldn't capture the videos of my granddaughters. Heaven forbid!
In addition I had tried to just re-install Windows XP Pro on the disk using the slipstream disk described below. This resulted in a half pregnant install where each boot asked to run setup or boot to windows. The default was to run setup which resulted in a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). The problem was created by a virus called Norton GoBack sold by Symantec as part of my Norton System Works 2006 which I could not uninstall by itself or with the entire Norton System Works deinstall and Windows said I could not complete the install unless it was removed. Complicating the issue was that I have my WinXP Pro machine sharing a monitor, keyboard and mouse through a KVM with my new Vista 64-Bit computer. With the KVM there was the risk that while I was booting I might not be there to select boot to windows rather than run setup and then BSOD.
Before starting, I decided to "slipstream" my original Windows XP Pro 2002 all the way up to Service Pack 3. To get instructions for this I Googled "slipstream xp sp3" and found the article "How to slipstream windows XP Service Pack 3 to Create an Integrated XP Setup Disk with SP3" at HowToHaven. I followed the steps in the article blindly, but carefully to create two XP Pro SP3 install disks, the extra one just in case the other one didn't work.
To start the re-install process, and remove any doubt whether I wanted to do this I removed the primary partition, created a new one for the entire disk and formatted it as NTFS. To do this step I used the Live version of Gnu Disk Partitioner (GParted 0.4.5-2). Live GParted is Linux based and boots up from a CD quickly. What a nice simple program to use and very similar to the last version of Partition Magic I used years ago. First step, success.
Then I tried installing XP Pro. It booted to the CD and looked like it was going to go smoothly, only to fail when it said it couldn't find any hard disk installed on the system. Another quick trip to Google revealed that Windows didn't recognize that I had SATA support and I needed the to download the drivers to a 3-1/2 inch floppy and use them early in the install process. I went to the Asus web site and downloaded all drivers for my A8V motherboard. One of them had a make disk utility for doing what I needed. That's when I found that coming by a 3-1/2 inch drive and finding a disk for it was no simple feat. Found some old Linux boot disks and other stuff and tried formatting and making the disk in my wife's HP desktop running Win XP Home but it wouldn't do it. In a panic I decided to break out my old Windows 98SE laptop and see if it could deal with the 3-1/2 inch floppy. First thing it told me was the disk was locked which was probably why my wife's computer couldn't do anything with it, but it was too stupid to tell me.
The second attempt installing XP Pro with SP3 went pretty smooth. Pressed the F6 key when prompted and inserted the 3-1/2 inch floppy to load the SATA / RAID drivers. Holding my breath until the prompt came up asking for my product key into which I entered my original product key and in about a half hour I had a "working" Windows XP Pro computer again!
Fixing the network setup (it wanted a dial-up connection?), was a first step and then quickly re-installing Norton Internet Security 2009. These steps went very smooth.
I created some accounts and decided to end the day on a success and would install all the other stuff later.
The first thing I noticed this morning was that the video was honked up. Dragging a window would cause it to be redrawn slowly. I looked at the Device Manager and the video device had a Yellow Question Mark indicating it didn't know what it was, and had decided to use a generic VGA driver. There was another Yellow Question Mark indicating there was another unknown device. Opening the case and pulling the card revealed I had a eVGA e-GeForce 6200 AGP card with 256 MB DDR memory. I went to the evga web site, downloaded and installed the latest driver. Sure enough that fixed the problem with the video.
After that, I thought I would install the LeadTek WinFast Multimedia Software Pack which hadn't worked for a couple years now. This fixed the second Yellow Question Mark and now all the installed devices seem to be recognized.
Next I installed Nero 6 which came with my Pioneer DVR-710 DVD recorder. The drive itself seems to have been recognized during the Windows install.
Well, the Dazzle Digital Video Creator 80 along with it's MGI Video Wave 4 software seems to have installed okay. When I plugged the DVC 80 into a USB port Windows recognized it, loaded the drivers and said it's working properly. That's great news if it's true.
I am amazed at how much software I had installed on this computer:
- ULead Video Studio 7 SE
- ULead DVD MovieFactory and Cool 3D
- Pinnacle Studio 9 (previously had both 7 and 8 on it)
- Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 (7.0 on Vista Machine)
- Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 (7.0 on Vista Machine)
- Microsoft Office XP Professional 2002
- Microsoft FrontPage 2002 (Yuk!)
- Microsoft Visio Professional 2002
- Microsoft Project Standard 2002
- TextPad
- MyInfo
- WinZip 12
- ... and all those downloaded programs, oh my!
Well I'll be off the rest of the day, installing and rebooting.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Linux Still Sucks
Back on April 4th and 8th, I commented to my own post "Linux (Fedora 10) Sucks!" that I had ordered and installed CentOS 5.2 on two computers. All went well once I added memory to the old IBM E series 580. Both the Micron and IBM installed CentOS quickly and they both run fine. Last weekend, over the long Memorial Day weekend, I thought I would run Package Updater. The updater appeared to run just fine on the IBM, but the Micron came up an error while resolving dependencies. The error message reads, "Unable to resolve dependencies for some packages selected for installation." Under details it says, "Missing Dependency: /usr/share/magic.mime is needed by package httpd-2.2.3-22.el5.centos.i386 (updates)". Of course when I go to the /usr/share directory, there sits the magic.mime file. Today I Google the "Missing Dependency..." and sure enough a guru has trouble shot the problem and found all you have to do is clean out the Yum database with the command "yum clean all". This seems to have fixed the problem this weekend, but why did the problem exist in the first place?
After I ran the Linux software updater, the Micron wanted to reboot and I told it to go ahead. It came up in a screen resolution of 800x600. You would think no problem, I'll just set the resolution back to 1280x1024 that I had been using before and take advantage of my 19 inch monitor. As I should have expected when I tried resetting the screen resolution, my choices are now 800x600 and 640x480. Now what's up with that? I give up, Linux is never going to mature and will always be nothing more than a playground for the people who want to play there.
This new episode reminds me of the "good old days" back in 1997-98 while running Redhat 5.0 and needing to setup my video card. I had time back then, wanted a Unix box at home and wanted to learn this new thing called Linux. Back in those days if your video card didn't come supported out of the box, you did some rather bizarre calculations and then put the results in one of the configuration files in a very specific order. Then came the Xconfigurator or some such. Been there, done that, grew tired of that. Finally, when the computer I was running Linux on back in 2002 or 2003 burned out the IDE controller trying to load Redhat 9, I decided the heck with it and didn't run Linux until I ran across Fedora Core 6 in a magazine in late 2006. That's when I bought the Micron at a garage sale. This is how I got back in the Linux playground. I was hoping that Linux had matured and all the esoteric mechanization to do the simplest tasks was gone and Linux was maturing. Obviously, it was not to be true.
Looks like the next time Linux costs me money, in either software or hardware, I'll just let it die. Until then these two machines will limp along updating when they can and falling behind when they can't. When they die for whatever reason they will end up in a re-cycling center somewhere.
Just to make it perfectly clear, I am no fan of Microsoft Windows either. Microsoft's careless disregard for how much the hardware you must buy to support their software and not to mention the ridiculous software prices drives me nuts. I've got this XP Pro machine that has managed to corrupt it's NTFS file system. Not sure if this problem is Windows or the Symantec/Norton System Works and their virus called GoBack. Oh well, that's a story for another post.
Then there's this Gateway, Vista 64-bit stuff.
Sounds to me like I am just getting older and less tolerant of the things that don't work like they should, or maybe I am expecting too much. I don't want to keep complaining about Linux, I just want it to work without jumping through hoops and clicking my heels together the right number of times.
After I ran the Linux software updater, the Micron wanted to reboot and I told it to go ahead. It came up in a screen resolution of 800x600. You would think no problem, I'll just set the resolution back to 1280x1024 that I had been using before and take advantage of my 19 inch monitor. As I should have expected when I tried resetting the screen resolution, my choices are now 800x600 and 640x480. Now what's up with that? I give up, Linux is never going to mature and will always be nothing more than a playground for the people who want to play there.
This new episode reminds me of the "good old days" back in 1997-98 while running Redhat 5.0 and needing to setup my video card. I had time back then, wanted a Unix box at home and wanted to learn this new thing called Linux. Back in those days if your video card didn't come supported out of the box, you did some rather bizarre calculations and then put the results in one of the configuration files in a very specific order. Then came the Xconfigurator or some such. Been there, done that, grew tired of that. Finally, when the computer I was running Linux on back in 2002 or 2003 burned out the IDE controller trying to load Redhat 9, I decided the heck with it and didn't run Linux until I ran across Fedora Core 6 in a magazine in late 2006. That's when I bought the Micron at a garage sale. This is how I got back in the Linux playground. I was hoping that Linux had matured and all the esoteric mechanization to do the simplest tasks was gone and Linux was maturing. Obviously, it was not to be true.
Looks like the next time Linux costs me money, in either software or hardware, I'll just let it die. Until then these two machines will limp along updating when they can and falling behind when they can't. When they die for whatever reason they will end up in a re-cycling center somewhere.
Just to make it perfectly clear, I am no fan of Microsoft Windows either. Microsoft's careless disregard for how much the hardware you must buy to support their software and not to mention the ridiculous software prices drives me nuts. I've got this XP Pro machine that has managed to corrupt it's NTFS file system. Not sure if this problem is Windows or the Symantec/Norton System Works and their virus called GoBack. Oh well, that's a story for another post.
Then there's this Gateway, Vista 64-bit stuff.
Sounds to me like I am just getting older and less tolerant of the things that don't work like they should, or maybe I am expecting too much. I don't want to keep complaining about Linux, I just want it to work without jumping through hoops and clicking my heels together the right number of times.
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