bobpeers -> blog

Like many people who are interested in IT one of my secondary functions is to help friends and family ‘fix’ their computers. Of course I’m happy to do this but sometimes problems just make me want to tear my hair out (I’m of course talking about Windows Vista here).

This time it was trying to fix a Toshiba Satellite U300 laptop running Vista Home Premium. The computer booted and reached the login screen but we couldn’t login. Every time a warning appeared saying something about the ‘SNES service could not log you in as the security token could not be found’.

I Googled for a solution and tried to fix it using sfc /scannow and a few other commands but nothing worked so rather than waste more time I decided to reinstall since there was no valuable data to loose.

The initial reinstall went fine (if very slowly) but soon after it all started to go wrong. Since the laptop is a couple of years old there were of course plenty of updates from Microsoft, I expected it to initially find Vista SP 1 but instead Windows Update found 73 other updates. I decided that it must know best (sometimes other updates are required before you can install a SP after all) but I was wrong.

About 2 hours and 3 reboots later the updates were installed but then the computer would not shutdown, it would just hang at the ‘Logging off’ screen and only a hard reset would turn it off. During the updates I knew a few system restore points must be created so I decided to roll back a few updates to see if I could pinpoint where it sent wrong. Unfortunately system restore stubbornly refused to fulfil it’s sole purpose, stopping with an error that ‘System restore could not complete the restore’ or something equally cryptic and useless.

There was nothing to do except for another reinstall. Except this time I downloaded the Vista SP1 Standalone file so I could force SP1 as the first update. Sure enough this worked fine, so the next time I rebooted I only had 3 updates from Windows Update to install.

With that out of the way I only had to remove the 10-15 bloatware applications installed by Toshiba (desktop sidebar gadgets for eBay and Amazon, DesktopSMS software etc etc…) and the laptop was as good as new!

The main points to come out of this are.

1. When Windows goes wrong it really goes wrong. Often it’s just not worth trying to fix the problem, rather just reinstall.
2. Windows Update needs to be a lot smarter.
3. Why the hell is Windows Update so slow. Download, install, reboot while updating, install some more…it just goes on and on. Can it really take 2 hours and 3 reboots to install 73 updates?
4. Microsoft Windows is a commercial product that often points to lack of Linux support as a major failing of Linux. But realistically how many people actually call Microsoft to fix their computer when their OS fails. I’m guessing the outside the US it’s not many, it’s left to friends and family to run MS support for free.
5. Why does Vista in particular make me feel like I’ve lost control of my computer. Everything seems so well hidden that when it works it’s OK but when it fails you’re on your own.

For sure the learning curve for Linux is steeper but it just does many things right.

1. Having not used my Fedora 10 system for a while it needed 131 updates the last time I booted it. Even on an old laptop this took about 40 minutes to complete with no reboots at all. When I did reboot, the system was just as stable as before.
2. Sure I’ve had a few problems but because everything is open and easy to find I can nearly always trace the problem and fix it myself. I’ve NEVER reinstalled the OS to fix a problem.
3. I have control of my computer, no clicking through license agreements whenever I update a program and no entering of license keys to check that I’m allowed to use the software.

I still enjoy the challenge of fixing other peoples computers but I’m wondering if I should charging Microsoft for my time!