Today my work computer crashed. Badly.
The only thing I did was that I rebooted. The previous day I had installed over 2 GBs worth of programs. Really, there were only two (plus one application I was developing): Visual Studio .NET (1.4 GB) and IIS (around 1 GB). Really, nothing should be that big. They must be one hell of programs since they take that much space. Had I installed help files, that had taken yet 1.9 GB more. Ridiculous. But that's another story.
I needed to install the programs to write my very first C# application. That turned out to be a multi-threaded Windows service requiring UI and communicating to some activeX controls. C# is merely a rip-off of Java, but that's another story as well. Anyway, I was immediately familiar with C# and Visual Studio that I had never before really used. I have to say that C#'s threading model is interesting, clever even. Someone could argue that it's not necessarily too object-oriented, but as pragmatist, I realize that treating a function directly as a thread-able object be is a much simpler than extending Java's Thread class.
I had also installed one security patch, but hadn't rebooted till today. I had started getting some weird security errors even though my C# service application I was developing had been working well before, so I rebooted. After the computer restarted I never got to the login screen any more. Mouse was working but CTRAL-ALT-DEL didn't respond at all. Safe mode or rolling back to "last known good configuration" didn't help. So, I thought, it has something to do with the services I had installed. Well, how do you stop the rogue services? No easy way of course.
I run the recovery console and stopped all the services I knew were new. Didn't help at all. What do you do then? The same thing you've always done in the past 15 years Windows has existed. Re-install the operating system. At least there's a recovery installation in XP, so you can keep all your settings. The first time after the first reboot during the installation, I got a funny (or not so funny) error message (don't remember exactly what it was, I'll find out) and a blue screen of death with a message saying that the computer has been stopped to prevent damage to my computer. Whatever that could be, I think the damage had already been done.
Well. I knew the hard disk hadn't been damaged (since I had run chkdsk from the recovery console), so I just tried again. Lo and Behold, it worked this time. Since it takes a while for to complete the installation and it was Friday, pretty late, I just left home and crossed my fingers that the installation would go fine. Probably everything's going to work fine tomorrow morning. Or not.
It's just impossible for me to understand why is it that it seems that you still need to re-install your Windows OS regularly once or twice a year. While I admit that NT/2000/XP have been a lot more stable than Windows 3.x/95/98/Me ever were it is just outrageous that the only answer, when a bit bigger problem in Windows happens, is to re-install the whole operating system again.
I'm not blaming Microsoft for writing bad code or requiring them to make sure that something like this doesn't ever happen. Having been in the business for years, I've accepted the sad truth that typically software just is buggy. (But I refuse to believe that you couldn't write bug free code.) But what I don't get and approve is that there's neither a good way to tell what actually went wrong nor a simpler way of fixing something than re-installing your operating system. Where's my 4GB Opteron Linux workstation? Linux distros have been getting a lot better in the past few years, but I remember the days when your graphical desktop kept crashing and you needed to search for new patches and modify your configuration files daily to get your software running, but the good thing with Linux is that at least it's possible to locate the problem, tweak it and get it working.
Btw, while we are at it, let me tell you about the last time I got a new computer. I had a lot of files in my old computer so I wanted migrate the data to the new computer. I used disk cloning software to make an exact image of the hard disk on the new one. Booted the new computer, and of course it crashed with a blue screen. After a couple of unsuccessful recovery installation tries, I ended up cloning the disk, doing a new install without formatting the new drive, then copying the old registry files (except the system registry file) over to the new drive. That way I managed to keep all the old system and application settings, and user configurations. I only manually needed to re-install some service settings. And does Microsoft tell you that you can do this? Of course not. For some reason they want the users to have the nice memories and read zillion times the great ads shown during the installation process telling you how productive you will be with the new system and how many cool things you can do.
Stop whining and get a Mac.
Posted by: pete at December 9, 2005 11:49 AM