Insomnia

Those that have been reading my blog for a little while will remember that my wife has been having all sorts of trouble with her HP desktop computer with Vista on it. The reliability of the machine has been so bad that I decided to install the release candidate of Vista SP1 when it became available. That improved things slightly but the computer still couldn't properly shut down 2 times out of 3.

Well, the release candidate started complaining that it was not going to be supported anymore and that I had to install the real thing. So, on a rainy morning this weekend I started the process that would eventually take over 4 hours of my life.

The first step was to remove the outdated version of the the service pack. After some Googling to make sure that I was removing the right update I started the removal process. The first time, the machine froze and it had to retrieve a restore point to recover. The second time, the removal succeeded. But alas, the service pack did not show up in the Windows update dialog. Instead, Vista informed me that there were 19 updates to download and install first. I started the process and the computer froze at the 3rd update. I had to force a reboot of the machine and Vista retrieved another restore point. Back to square one.

Looking at the install log yielded no useful information. I turned to the HP web site for help. After describing the computer model and navigating to the support and downloads page. I was informed that I had to update drivers for SP1 to install properly on this hardware. No less than 6 driver updates were critical or recommended for this particular model of computer. From the Video card to the SATA drivers without forgetting a good old BIOS update. Each one of those updates had to be downloaded and installed individually. And each one required a reboot after installation.

An hour later, I was able to apply the 19 updates that would not apply before. After those 19, there were 3 more that appeared. And finally, Windows update offered SP1 for my installing pleasure.

So why the big rant? Is it just me or was this a really big missed opportunity by the hardware vendor? That PC came with a disk full of crappy software I didn't want. What if HP had invested some money and offered real value to their customers? What if they invested to streamline the delivery of critical driver updates. The same way Microsoft does it with its Windows updates. Something that a normal consumer, one without a degree in computer science, could understand. Something that didn't require me spending 4 hours on a weekend watching my computer reboot.

Interestingly, my Dell laptop had a different issue with a similar resolution. I was having trouble with the sleep/hibernate functions and I had to update the BIOS and Video drivers from the Dell site. The process was not much easier but at least, the hardware didn't hang while applying updates.

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Finally, I got rid of my glass ceiling



A quick look at the reliability meter tells me that I am having a much more stable system.

Unfortunately, I don't think it is related to my last "tuning" of disabling the Adobe quickstart application. There was another Windows update in between and the number of failures has been a lot lower recently. Pretty much all the failures that I see in the reliability meter now are Windows shutdown failures. You shut the computer down and it freezes on shutdown. Aside from that, my system has been really stable. I guess I am going to stop bitching about it now.

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As ars technica hypothesizes, it was put there to annoy you. Yes you, the software developer.

In the past, Windows developers were making assumptions about their privileges and calling all sorts of Windows APIs and accessing all manners of resources and files without thinking about the required privileges. Now, with the UAC, if you want to avoid being annoying to your users, you will attempt to get your work done without requiring an elevation of privilege. And yes, that includes things like installers.

So, developers, don't disable your UAC. Feel your user's pain. It will make you a gentler, kinder developer.

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There it is again. The glass ceiling:



A couple of days after the SP1 install, My OS stopped responding two days in a row and I was back at 3.4. I scrolled back the chart to see where that behavior started. I have had this 2-3 week cycle of "up to 6.5, back down to 3" stability index since February 13. I looked at the software installs for that day and there were a whole whack of things:

• Many updates from Microsoft (half a dozen or more)
  
• Adobe Reader 8.1.2 install
• Many drivers were updated too (touchpad, keyboard, USB mouse, ATA adaptor)

The Adobe Reader looks like a winner to me. Using autoruns, I figured-out that it automatically starts a "speed launcher" utility when Windows starts. I disabled that. Let's see what happens in a couple of weeks.

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Just another me-too post about installing SP1 of Vista. It just finished installing (took over 90 minutes) and it seems to have installed without any problems.

Now, the real measure of how much better it will be with the service pack will lay in the reliability monitor screen. Here's a screen shot of my reliability monitor as it was just before I installed SP1:



Lets see in a couple of weeks if I can ever get passed the 6.5 (or so) mark that seems to be the glass ceiling that I have always hit in the past.

I sure hope it improves. This is on a brand new XPS M1330 Dell laptop that has no additional strange hardware installed. Only what was installed in there by Dell.

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I already talked about my wife's Vista issues this but it is getting ridiculous.

She is self employed and each month she produces an invoice to the customer to eventually get paid. This is a simple procedure that involved the following steps:

1. Copy last month's invoice (word document) and rename the document
2. Open the new invoice and change the numbers/dates
3. Print the document
4. Save the document

Well. Using Vista... what used to take 10 minutes now takes almost an hour. Copying a file now in Windows is so difficult that it takes over 10 minutes just to copy the file. The file is 45Kb the simple Ctrl-C Ctrl-V to copy the file now requires Vista to spend minutes (an I am not exaggerating, this is a known bug) calculating how long it will take.

After this happens, you open the document in Word and edit it. That is still quick thank heavens. Once that is over, printing went ok as well.

Saving on the other hand was not that good. After pushing "save", Word complained that there was not enough space on the hard disk to save the file. The file is 45Kb and there is over 100G of space free on the hard disk. After much searching for a solution, we abandoned and closed the damned thing without saving.

Oh! and after that, the computer didn't shut down. (And I did wait for 20 minutes for the machine to shut down) I had to force a power down. I miss XP.

Labels: tech, Vista

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3 weeks ago, my wife bought a new computer. Of course it came with Vista preinstalled.

This seemingly innocuous event triggered 3 weeks of pain and costly upgrades.

First, many of the software packages that she uses just wouldn't work properly in Vista unless the latest version was purchased.

Second, her PDA (a Compaq Ipaq) was "too old" to work with the Windows Mobile Device Center. So she had to upgrade to one of the smartphone gizmos.

And yesterday, it was the last straw, after spending all the time to move the stuff from her old computer to her new, cleaning up the old computer and setting it up at her mother's place, she decided to buy her mother and herself a webcam to be able to video conference. The Vista driver from Logitech has a problem that disables the computer's audio after installation. So now, she has a working webcam but no more audio. Uninstalling the driver doesn't fix that. The current fix to get the audio back is to do a factory reset of the PC. (link)

Makes me wish I could put all that stuff back in the box and get the same HP computer with Windows XP from the store. But it's a little too late for that now. And they won't sell me a computer with XP installed anymore.

Labels: tech, Vista

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