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!

I installed Vista SP1 on my girlfriends computer yesterday (it’s in Danish which wasn’t one of the original release languages, hence the delay) and was disappointed to find that her computers network problem has not been fixed.

After writing about Microsofts problems with selling Vista to businesses it was funny to read this article where Steve Ballmer describes Vista as a ‘work in progress’.

As the article says, every piece of software is actually a work in progress, we all expect new verisons and enhansments to be released, but for such a figure to say this while at the same time trying to convince corporations to embrace Vista it sounds like for a moment he forgot his marketing spiel and the truth slipped out

After my recent problems with networking in Vista I’ve come across even more serious issues.

Last weekend we visited my girlfriends brothers who bought a new computer last year but have never been able to get it connected to the internet. It’s common in many flats in Denmark that the building has it’s own internet connection that is then shared amongst the flats; basically creating a LAN in the building. It’s fast, cheap and if it fails then it’s not your problem to fix.

I was trying to get a connection (they have Vista Home Premium) but all it kept saying was that the LAN connection could not be identified. I tried every possible fix but nothing would get me a valid IP address. Her brother told me that they had been warned that the buildings LAN didn’t work with Vista and they should get a router to connect through so they had bough one just in case.

Sure enough as soon as I connected the router everything worked without a hitch, they router was assigned an IP address and the router gave out an IP address to the computer.

The sheer fact they they were forced to spend money on a router that should be totally unnecessary amazes me. It basically means that everyone in their building buying a new computer will have to also buy a router, unbelievable!

This exercise in futility also made me think more about carrying around a bootable USB with some Linux distribution installed, or maybe a Linux Live CD to be used for testing and diagnostic tasks. One of the problems I had was that I couldn’t easily tell if the problem lay with Vista or maybe there was no internet connection at all. If I could have booted into Linux I could have easily diagnosed the problem and been sure it was with Vista from the start.

Type these words into Google and you quickly see there’s plenty of problems with networking and Vista. My own particular problem drives me crazy as it seems there’s no fix apart from manually resetting the network adapter every time it drops the connection.

It doesn’t happen straight away, but after some time (often after the computer has been woken from sleep) the network icon says I only have ‘Local connection’, not local and internet. Even this isn’t strictly true since I cannot connect to my router, I actually have no connection at all.

If I right click the icon and select ‘Diagnose and repair’ to open the fancy ‘Vista Network Diagnostics And Troubleshooting tool’ it suggests this.

After resetting the network adapter everything works fine again every time. This sort of bug is very irritating, even more so for my girlfriend who is not so technical ;-).

I can hardly believe Vista shipped with so many network issues that still haven’t been resolved. Hopefully the soon to be available Service Pack 1 will fix this but I’m not holding my breath.

It seems that the well known system requirements for Vista have caused some confusion, even amongst IT professionals.

The other day at work I was sending a couple of 2-3 year old HP desktop PCs in to IT support to have Windows XP Professional installed along with Office 2003. These are not cutting edge machines but they have 3GHz Pentium 4′s and 512MB of RAM, more than enough for a business PC running office applications.

Their response was that they didn’t think they would run Windows XP without 1GB of RAM. My 4 year old laptop with a 1.3GHz processor and 512MB of RAM runs XP and office just fine and the last time I checked the requirements for Windows XP it said 128MB of RAM was required.

I know that new computers all have at least 1GB of RAM but the idea that you need this to do anything is just not true (at least if not using Vista). It seems that people have heard so much about how you need X MB of RAM or a dual core processor that the average processing power of a PC is far greater than most people require.

I often see adverts from high street computer stores describing quite high-spec machines as ‘good for basic text editing, email and browsing the internet’ when that’s the sort of thing that can be done on a mobile phone these days.

It’s one of the (many) reasons I use Linux, it does all I require and much more without making me feel like I need to upgrade my laptop every 6 months.