Talk About Software Bloat.......

The laptop computer was beginning to have performance issues (lots of slowness and weird screen resolution issues) so I decided it was time for a rebuild from scratch to clean up the accumulated mess.

The laptop is about three years old and had one hard drive failure/replacement under warranty in the past.

It is running MS Vista Home Premium and there the story, trial and tribulations, not to mention lots of waiting time while stuff installs begins.

So far after 3 days of rebuilding, in which it has been constantly downloading, and installing, Vista updates, the amount of hard drive space being taken up by Vista, its updates, and a limited installation of MS Office 2007 (Word, PowerPoint and Excel, with no Access, Outlook or OneNote) is 51 GB!

Oh, and we're not done yet as it just began installing Vista Service Pack 2.

The Hard Drive is 102 GB.

So 50% of the total space on the hard drive is taken up by just the operating system it came with and was designed for, and the basic word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications that were contemporary with its release.

On the upside, in between multiple restarts for Vista updates, I've re-added the Dell printer driver and it actually connected on the first try, which was impressive, not to mention a full anti-virus suite. I also removed both MS Works and the trial MS Office install that was on it which was interfering with the purchased copy of MS Office - the software license key for the full Office 2007 Ultimate edition that was purchased wouldn't work with the trial (and unlockable for full functionality with a license key) Office 2007 Home and Student version that was installed and the install kept failing so long as the locked trial version was on the system. Lots of fun.

With luck the reinstall will be finished tonight and we'll have our laptop back in use again.

I don't condone this but I really, really, understand.

Man Shoots Girlfriend’s Computer After Installing Windows Vista

Friday night in Columbia South Carolina, ex-law enforcement officer Ray Jackson lost his temper while trying to repair his girlfriend’s computer.
...
After installing Windows Vista on the girlfriend’s 2 year old computer Jackson was trying to get some of her older programs to work with the new operating system. “He couldn’t get anything to work like it was supposed to”, said girlfriend Wanda White. “He just kept screaming at it and smacking the side of the computer”.
...
White had heard enough cursing from her boyfriend and went next door to her friend’s apartment. After about 20 minutes White and her friend heard gun shots from the apartment where Jackson was working. ..... When she opened the door there sat Jackson with his pistol in his hand. He had just shot the computer 5 times and missed once. The miss had gone into the neighbors apartment and the bullet was lodged into their refrigerator.

He's not the only one:
Man Shoots Computer in Somerset County, NJ
Man Shoots Computer in Issaquah, Washington
Man Shoots Laptop in Lafayette, Colorado

I'm certainly considering it, but even as it would be extremely cathartic, it would void the warranty pretty seriously.

But for all of you considering the same (and I know there's a lot of you out there) remember this:

1. Have a safe backstop (i.e. one that bullets cannot travel through like a concrete or brick wall). You are 100% responsible for where those bullets may end up, and they can pass through a computer and on to who knows where. Remember your enemy is the computer not some innocent bystander on the other side of a thin interior wall somewhere. Don't miss and be careful, Mr. Ricochet is not your friend.

2. It is much, much, better and safer for all concerned to do this at a shooting range, and there's less chance of you being arrested for firing a gun in city limits, reckless endangerment, or whatever other charge police can come up with to lock you up until you calm down.

3. Make sure it is your computer you are shooting, respect other's malfunctioning frustrating and worthless computer property.

4. The Lafayette shooter, in hanging the shot-up computer over the bar as a trophy had a stroke of pure genius, for that artistry alone the judge should let him off.

5. Save yourself the headache and don't get Vista (hard to do as they preload it on everything but its worth avoiding the trouble).

As you can guess, this gorram HP Vista 64 computer is still not working. Even after 4 destructive rebuilds it still will without warning fail to boot as it finds some kind of conflict, then it does a system restore and removes whatever programs I've installed and remains unstable.

I now know about half the technical support people in India, and I've finally made it to level two technical support after rebuilding this piece of crap 4 times.

Make no mistake, the Indian techs are very nice and they do try to be helpful, and for the average problem I'm sure they're fine, but they start out on script and it takes about 20 minutes each for them to read the service ticket case notes and for me to explain what is in the note and that I've been through this already. I've done 4 destructive rebuilds including rebuilding off completely new discs they shipped to me, and the problem still keeps recurring. I'm now an expert at rebuilding a Vista computer and getting it to the point that it will crash with elan. Funnily enough when i ask if they have an XP image that is compatible with this computer they say installing X on it would void the warranty -- Ha!.

I've now spent untold hours messing with this thing. I'm now trying to decide whether to return it to Costco completely or just ship the desktop box to HP and let them try redoing it. The problem of course is Costco no longer offers this same package with the nice big monitor and good hardware configuration it came with at this price (its been about 60 days of me messing around with tech support trying to get this to work) I have 30 days left to return it to Costco. And of course both Dell and HP and all other Costco computer vendors ship all their machines with Vista, and their better machines with Vista 64, so if its not some hardware conflict I'll probably see this again. Spit.

Given the amount of troubleshooting and rebuilding, I'm seriously considering wasting more time and money and just building a computer from scratch. At least I'll be troubleshooting my own mistakes rather than Vista and HPs. When I spend extra and buy a computer from a manufacturer I do expect it to work and be stable, not to be a beta tester and constantly rebuilding the operating system.

HP and Vista is a neverending adventure in reboot and reformat

Of course the destructive recovery done last week didn't last for long and didn't fix the problem.

After backing up all my data and doing a destructive restore things started off rather auspiciously.

Programs installed without issue. I restarted after each program was installed to see if a certain program was at fault. No problems. Everything went on great, it looked like I had all my data back and programs rinning fine.

The HP update ran. I foolishly accepted installing the updates it recommended for the computer.

You can guess what happened next.

Yep, after the restart, straight to the black screen of death.

Every program installed since, every Microsoft update installed since causes the same thing.

So I called HP support again.

Of course, they have no record of the online chat assistance or the service call I made last week.

After discussion with the tech, they've decided since I already did a destructive software recovery from the partition they will ship me the recovery by disc.

So I get to do a whole new reformat.

Anybody want to place a bet on whether this fixes the problem?

Given that I had XP running on a system for about 7 years without having to reformat without this kind of trouble I certainly can't recommend Vista 64 for anyone at this point as in less than 2 months its been causing all sorts of issues. On the upside, I'm getting really good at backing up and restoring my data grrr.

More fun with Vista

This computer is crashing like the housing market -- with no bailout in sight. Everytime Windows does an automatic update, on the next shutdown and startup it fails to boot, requiring a hard turnoff then it starts windows repair and then works.


In search of a remedy I contacted HP technical support. After describing the issue here was their "brilliant" solution -- turn off windows automatic updates.

Anyone see the problem with this "solution"? While it will stop the system from crashing on a weekly basis, now if I manually update I expect it to crash again.. its not a solution but a problem avoidance technique.

I beginning to think the problem is Windows Defender update as that seems to be what was updated yesterday before the system crashed again. Anyone know if Defender updates are known for this problem?

The wild vistas of Vista

So after 8 years of my home computer I decide its time to upgrade. The olde computer was built by Scott Reschke of Frag Center (If you're ever in East Lansing and like to play computer games his place is the place to go). It gave great service but lately is developing an atittude and it is getting slow.

Unfortunately he's not building custom machines anymore and he gave me a few suggestions as to what to get.

I end up purchasing an HP Pavilion, AMD Athlon dual core with 4gb ram, 500 GB hard drive and a monitor that came with the package that is ridiculously big in size. Looks nice. It also comes with Vista 64 Home Premium on board. So far so good.

Plug it in and go, and we start having problems:

1. Adobe flash player if installed as a plugin to Firefox 3.0.1, or even downloaded direct from Adobe's website and then installed crashes Vista completely - we're talking the black screen of death, Vista repair runs and removes it and the computer restarts. This was not a fluke as I tried it multiple times and same result each time - install flash player and the computer gets it. Interestingly, and weirdly enough, flash player exists and works just fine in IE with no ill effects and it is not removed in the repair. Since I really like Firefox, this is a major annoyance.

2. Thunderbird - Vista seems to pluck Thunderbird's feathers, I install it, copy over the mail, and it looks like its working, after some tweaking. I then upgrade Thunderbird from 0.7.2 to the latest version and it stops working cold. Still have not resolved this one and my mail archive is stuck in it, which is not good.

3. Vista 64 is not backward compatible with a lot of my programs - my old, paid off, lovingly functional Photoshop 7 and Premiere 6.5 will not work so I'm going to eventually have to buy replacements for what was some darn nice and comfy software, and I hesitate to try and install my old reliable Microsoft Office 2000.
Thankfully Canon is on the ball and their camera software has an upgrade you can download as the software that comes with the SD1000 flips out on Vista 64, so that critical bit works for the pictures at least.

4. Every so often Vista does an automatic update of some Microsoft Vista or related product in the background and without notice, the machine restarts and bamn - back to the black screen of death with a required manual shutdown, windows repair and it sometimes repairs it and sometimes it takes everything short of lethal force to get it back to rights. I can find no log entries of these errors so it is a pain to track down what is causing it. In short this operating system is way less stable that XP and that is simply unacceptable and aggravating.

On the upside:

A. It is much, much faster than my old machine. I can actually multitask without slowing everything to a crawl. Working with video I've shot is a lot quicker. There is a real speed difference and it seems to handle memory leacks much better.

B. Installation of hardware is real nice, great ability to pull drivers, my Suunto Vyper Dive computer USB cable was recognized no problem, which is a huge improvement over the install process for it in XP. Wireless setup is a snap, adding peripherals like the camera, USB Hard drive is similarly easy etc, they've clearly improved the driver architecture.

C. Most of my applications and data transferred over with no issues.

So its a toss up. The lack of stability is the real killer though and certainly adds to the discomfort level as you never know for sure that when you turn it off you can get it back on again. If it was stable with a few issues is one thing, the instability however is not giving me warm feelings toward Vista 64.