My October 2010 comments on "Firefox & Software Update Madness" didn't address Microsoft and the need to continuously update their software.
Microsoft created Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows 7 (Win7), the latest version of their operating system back in April or so. I happen to own three computers running Win7. My wife has a new laptop running Win7 64-bit Home Premium. I have an old home built computer running 32-bit Win7 Home Premium. I also have a computer running Win7 64-bit Ultimate, which I consider my primary computer.
When SP1 came out I was hesitant to install it based on past experience. I had learned the hard way that you should always let others do the initial late-beta testing that seems to be necessary after Microsoft initially releases a service pack. I chose to try installing SP1 on my 32-bit Win7 computer along with the other monthly updates. I started getting Blue Screens of Death (BSOD) randomly Eventually, I managed to track down the problems with help from Microsoft's update support and the computer started running normally after resorting to a cloned disk backup. To play on Dirty Harry, I felt lucky and installed it without problems on my wife's new laptop. Then I decided it should be safe and tried installing on my 64-bit Ultimate computer. I regretted the decision for the next four weeks.
The install went poorly and hung at 16% after rebooting. Tom's Hardware web site gave a suggestion to go ahead and turn the computer off and then turn it back on to go ahead and finish the install. The suggestion worked and the install completed. I began to suffer BSOD's both while running and even more scary during the boot sequence. I would be presented with a recovery screen after the boot failure which invariably said it failed. That's when I first contacted Microsoft for the new problems. The problems continued and I contacted MS support again the next weekend. The problems continued after this second contact with MS support so I called them yet again. After this I noticed things were still not right. The AMD Vision Control Center crashed immediately. Media Center crashed immediately, yet Media Player worked fine. I got a notice about IE8 shutting down unexpectedly, even though I'm running IE9. It mentioned an event number and I thought I would look at the event.
When I tried bringing up the Event Viewer it said that the Event Viewer snap-in could not be displayed and that it may not have been installed correctly. OMG, this is part of the operating system and I decided to call MS support once again. After explaining the new problems, the MS support idiot asked me whether I could boot without crashing. I said yes, and this idiot sent me back to another MS drone to get a new ticket number for this latest problem caused by MS SP1. That's when they told me they were going to charge me to fix this "new problem". I went ballistic and the MS drone eventually hung up on me. My only indication they were not there was a dial tone.
I decided to hell with Microsoft and their incompetence. I called a local computer repair guy to come to the house and figure out what's wrong. The repair guy came by the house and looked at the 64-bit system and decided to uninstall Win7 SP1 manually since according to Windows Update it had not installed completely. Once he did that he installed it again. All the symptoms are now gone. Best $100 I've spent in a while.
LESSON LEARNED: Most MS Support people are nice (not that last set of idiots) but they blindly follow a script which might only hide the true problem. The first three calls were to foreign support people. The first was in the Philippines and the second as well as the third were from India. The foreign support people were respectful, patient and easy to work with, even if they couldn't solve the problem. Only the American MS support people, if I remember right in Oregon, appeared more interested in ending the call than helping a customer with a problem caused by a update to their software. Nasty, nasty people.
Showing posts with label 64-bit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 64-bit. Show all posts
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Sunday, December 26, 2010
BlackBerry & RIM Comments
My first smart phone was a Palm Treo 755p. Oh how I miss that phone with it's stylus and touch screen. I replaced it with a RIM BlackBerry 8330 eventually. Even initially I had trouble with the BlackBerry. The first phone I had, I returned to the store and went home with a Samsung Insight instead. I ended up returning the insight after accidentally texting my wife's aunt in California at 4:30AM her time. Thankfully, it was a landline and the message didn't get delivered. Didn't get along well with the Insight's touch screen. I finally decided my first impression of BlackBerry must be wrong and it couldn't really be that bad.
I took another BlackBerry home and tried installing the desktop software on my 64-bit Vista Home Premium computer. No luck, the software didn't support 64-bit Vista. Eventually, I ended up just using the BlackBerry as a USB drive to transfer data. This all happened nearly two years ago, and my BlackBerry contract with Sprint is going to expire this coming spring.
I continued being disappointed with the BlackBerry. Installing apps was always a pain. My Treo 755p had long had the Slingbox app to watch my cable TV from anywhere, which never became available for my model 8330. Installing updates on the BlackBerry often caused a regression to an application or made the experience less fulfilling.
The Vista 64-bit computer has since been upgraded to 64-bit Win 7 Ultimate.
This morning I decided to try an app called Flixter that I learned about on InfoWorld.com. Sounded like it might be an interesting application. The link took me to appworld on blackberry.com. It wanted to install something called "Blackberry AppWorld Installer". I tried installing using Firefox with no luck. Tried using an IE window in Firefox with no luck. Finally started up IE 8 and tried installing from there. It seemed to install, but the connection to the phone didn't seem to work enough to satisfy the installation web page. Decided enough was enough and looked for help on the BlackBerry web site. What I quickly found was their recommended work around was to use a compatible operating system on my computer to install and use their application. In disgust I uninstalled Blackberry AppWorld Installer using the Control Panel.
Imagine the arrogance involved with a phone application (or web site or phone vendor) requiring that I use a compatible operating system on my computer to load their application. Although I have another 32-bit Win 7 Home Premium and three 32-bit XP @Home computers which might be compatible, they are not my primary computer. I will not defile them with this software. So I hereby decree, I will no longer install anything related to Blackberry on either my computer or the phone itself and will begin investigating Android phones to replace the BlackBerry. If I can't find a phone compatible with my needs then I'll do without a so-called smartphone and save lots of money each month. Oh how I miss my Palm Treo. Palm sort of reminds me of the Commodore story of a better product failing because they couldn't sell it to save themselves.
I took another BlackBerry home and tried installing the desktop software on my 64-bit Vista Home Premium computer. No luck, the software didn't support 64-bit Vista. Eventually, I ended up just using the BlackBerry as a USB drive to transfer data. This all happened nearly two years ago, and my BlackBerry contract with Sprint is going to expire this coming spring.
I continued being disappointed with the BlackBerry. Installing apps was always a pain. My Treo 755p had long had the Slingbox app to watch my cable TV from anywhere, which never became available for my model 8330. Installing updates on the BlackBerry often caused a regression to an application or made the experience less fulfilling.
The Vista 64-bit computer has since been upgraded to 64-bit Win 7 Ultimate.
This morning I decided to try an app called Flixter that I learned about on InfoWorld.com. Sounded like it might be an interesting application. The link took me to appworld on blackberry.com. It wanted to install something called "Blackberry AppWorld Installer". I tried installing using Firefox with no luck. Tried using an IE window in Firefox with no luck. Finally started up IE 8 and tried installing from there. It seemed to install, but the connection to the phone didn't seem to work enough to satisfy the installation web page. Decided enough was enough and looked for help on the BlackBerry web site. What I quickly found was their recommended work around was to use a compatible operating system on my computer to install and use their application. In disgust I uninstalled Blackberry AppWorld Installer using the Control Panel.
Imagine the arrogance involved with a phone application (or web site or phone vendor) requiring that I use a compatible operating system on my computer to load their application. Although I have another 32-bit Win 7 Home Premium and three 32-bit XP @Home computers which might be compatible, they are not my primary computer. I will not defile them with this software. So I hereby decree, I will no longer install anything related to Blackberry on either my computer or the phone itself and will begin investigating Android phones to replace the BlackBerry. If I can't find a phone compatible with my needs then I'll do without a so-called smartphone and save lots of money each month. Oh how I miss my Palm Treo. Palm sort of reminds me of the Commodore story of a better product failing because they couldn't sell it to save themselves.
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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