M$ Cost of Use
Posted on June 24, 2003
Filed Under Computing |
For those who cannot live without the OS from Redmond, WA, you are wasting too many hours dealing with its problems. For a long time now I’ve known M$ software is aweful, but it is number one on the desktop because of “ease of use”, blah blah blah. Ya right.
I should bill MS $200 for my time and $1,000,000,000 for my pain and suffering. But that is pocket change for them. Read on for my ongoing struggles…
[9:00]
I am currently setting up a dual boot, Win2k and RedHat/XD2 system, for a CAS staff member. Last night I installed Linux in under 1 hour, then Win2k in about 2. All was good last night when I left, all I had to do was change the IP address, hostname and add the user who will be using the system…
Then this morning I came in, setup Linux and rebooted to do the Win2k config.
Let the games begin. Win2k did not boot, grub would just kick back to the menu. So the MBR on the partition needs to be fixed, no problem. Well since Win2k does not have an obvious make boot disk option, I have to try to recover from the setup disk. But it won’t boot from the CDROM… so away I go to find and make FOUR boot disks. Ok, 20 min later I am ready to boot.
Upon booting (10min), I get an error saying that the MBR needs to repared and that I should use ‘chkdsk /f’. But the only button I have is REBOOT, no way to jump to a console and run the command. The error message goes on to say “If this is the first time you have seen this message, reboot and try again, otherwise do the fix (above).”
But I can’t reboot and I’m trying to go this route to get it fixed. But the geniuses at M$ say no (1hr). Fine, reinstall time.
So I reinstall the OS (2hr), and now it boots. I’m good to go, right?
Next step is to install Service Pack 3. Well due to a well know race condition in SP3, the gui DLL does not get installed properly and upon reboot there is no login screen. I googled the problem and found the fix. I need to copy a good version of msgina.dll to winnt\system32 and winnt\system32\dllcache . (1hr)
Rebooting gives me back the login screen… I’m almost there… nope. So now I try to reinstall all the software that installed last night… nope. Some apps have errors running the installer, others like OpenOffice have CRC errors while unziping the archive.(2hrs)
Ok, lets do all the Windoze updates first, then try to install, maybe it will work then… maybe not.
“IE 6 digital certificate not found, install anyway” –> YES.
“Error, no digital certificate” .. but I said it was ok to install. WTF M$!!!!
(0.5hr)
So get the above error for Outlook Express too, and neither will install. So I reboot and the installer starts up again, and without a problem finishes the IE an OE installs. But I thought they were not ditigally certified? If Windoze can install them now, why not before? (0.5hr)
Finally progress, OOo installed, now for Office2k. Adobe5.0 still bombs out. (1hr)
Office complains about office1.cab being corrupted!?
Reinstall #3, (1.5hrs).
No SP3, and Office2k, OOo, Acrobat, SSH all installed. (1hr)
But Office2k broke Mozilla.
Screw it, I’m out.
[20:30]
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7 Responses to “M$ Cost of Use”
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Ok, because of all the file corruption errors I suspect it may be a bad hard drive problem. But M$ is not off the hook, the drive ran stable, rock solid for 3 years under Linux with 3 OS upgrades, no problems at all. Second, I scaned the disk a couple of times so it should have found and corrected the error, rrright, ok. Nope.
Trying a new disk now. I hate Microsoft.
Just a thought, is its name an oxymoron. They make big bloated software that is hard to use and maintain.
That is all.
Mark, I could have saved you a few hours and told you to install M$ first and then open up some Gigs on the END of the HD for linux/GNU. M$ likes to live first, but linux/GNU is happy in almost any position you want to put it on the disk. This way you don’t mess up your MBR and you don’t have to play with GRUB or anything.
I switched from Win2K to RH 8.0 last September, but had to dual boot for a while because I wasn’t convinced this linux thing would work for me.
Just out of curiosity, who on faculty couldn’t install their own desktop? :-P
I haven’t had a HD die on me yet (knock on wood), but I can tell you hell stories about bad RAM. Oh man, it made me think my CDROM’s were on the fritz, nothing worked right, I couldn’t install stuff and got the blue screen of death in windows after a few minutes. Every time I booted into Linux (which was much more forgiving) it had to fix errors on my HD’s because bits were being lost from RAM. Thank God for journaled file systems.
As for your logic of it being M$’s fault the HD died. That made me laugh, although you have a point their crappy tools didn’t help you diagnose the problem very well. That’s how _other_ large companies make their money, filling in the holes.
Linux was imaged with SystemImager, Windoze was on its own hard drive. Win2k plays nicely with the MBR, unlike win9x.
>I switched from Win2K to RH 8.0 last September, but had to dual boot for a while because I wasn’t convinced this linux thing would work for me
So, how did this crazy Linux thing work out for you?
>who on faculty couldn’t install their own desktop?
It was Doris, Parnas’ tech. She could do it, but Lawford had me do it since I need something to do until OPG lets me in the building to look at their code.
>MS and hardware.
But Linux gracefully handled the hardware problems and worked without error, but Windoze doesn’t.. and worse, it doesn’t tell me exactly what the problem is, it gives random errors.
> Other companies to fill the holes
I still believe that you can produce an excellent product (ie. the 100 year light bulb) and still have a successful company. Most will pay a resonable premium for somethat that just works, not questions asked. But now they are paying a 85% premium on Windoze and what are they getting… crap.
Now for the biggest kick in the face of this whole ordeal, Parnas is buying Doris a new system, all my time and STRESS out the window.
Well, I’m glad somebody is getting a new computer.
Of course Windows isn’t going to tell you exactly what’s wrong. I’m suprised that I don’t see (well, I wouldn’t see them on my machine, but…) more
“Error Opening File: Call Product Support and quote error #45321-04″
Of course product support is a pay per incident thing these days once again fattening up MS’s purse.
Anyway, that problem is solved. Here’s a new one.
How can you sync contact and calendar information from windows to Ximian Evo? Mount the windows partition and write a script to strip out the contact info and write it to a Vcard file and then import it into Evo.
Would it be possible for my parents to have a “shared calendar” where they both put their info and such. This would be on a single machine, so both people would not have parallel access to Evo.
>How can you sync contact and calendar information from windows to Ximian Evo?
They both store the data in binary format, tough one. One way is to email the Vcards and Free/Busy info, i guess, but that is ugly.
>Would it be possible for my parents to have a “shared calendar” where they both put their info and such.
First, i don’t like what evo1.4 did to the calendar, much better UI before. Second, i’d say just prefix their calendar entries with their names.?
> First, i don’t like what evo1.4 did to the calendar, much better UI before. Second, i’d say just prefix their calendar entries with their names.?
I think I asked the question wrong. Lets say I have two users “Mom” and “Dad”. These two users want to share common calender and contact info. But they each have their own home directories and evolution dirs.
I guess I could symbolically link the calendar in both to a common calendar setup…. would that work?
I’ve herd talk about some sync software or something on the evo mailing list, but I’m not sure if it works with 1.4.