A few days ago, Outlook Express starting acting flaky - my account names were forcibly converted to 1, 2, 3, etc., and retyping in the correct ones refused to stick. Then, windows update started failing with useless messages consisting of 8 digit hex numbers.

So I thought I'd try Microsoft update tech support (which is free for update failures). They asked me to send them logs, which I did. Then, came an endless series of "try this ...", which usually involved unregistering a dozen dlls, rebooting, starting/stopping services, reregistering them, renaming system files, booting in safe mode, wiping directories, deleting files, rebooting, rebooting, all to no avail (except the 8 digit hex number would change).

Then came the exhortation to run a virus scan, with a couple links. The symantec virus scan crashed after a half hour. The other one completed, and found nothing.

At this point, it was apparent that tech support had no idea why this was happening, and I was beginning to worry there was either a rootkit installed, or there was just creeping corruption going on. I gave up on Microsoft tech support, and decided to reinstall Windows.

Do you know it takes THREE HOURS to install Windows from scratch? Gads, you install XP from the CD which requires rebooting several times, then again from the XP SP2 update CD (rebooting n more times), then you log in to Windows update and update/reboot 4 or 5 more times. Why can't Windows Update download everything at once and reboot only once?

So now I've got Windows reinstalled. Now comes the dance of reinstalling everything else. The worst is, of course, Outlook Express which completely loses track of everything after a reinstall. I have a crib sheet of most of the settings, but even so, there's no way to restore which newsgroup files are read/unread. I also use the undocumented method of finding which gawdawful directory O.E. squirrels the files away in (all in deeply nested hidden directories with 80+ character tty noise filenames) and saving/restoring the dbx files manually.

Most of the other apps aren't too bad, if you were smart enough to keep a crib sheet of all the serial numbers, registration numbers, and funky passwords. The whole job takes about 12 hours.

Morals of the story:

1) Keep a crib sheet of all the settings, passwords, serial numbers, registration follderalls, etc.

2) If you're going to provide an update program, fer cryin out loud, make it a monolithic program that doesn't depend on everything else in the OS working perfectly. After all, when you need it, it's probably because the rest of the system isn't right. And if the update program itself is corrupted, then tech support can just send you a new one.

3) If you're writing an app, don't require it to be reinstalled if Windows is reinstalled. DM programs don't need to be. Store your configuration in some text file that can be saved/restored. Please!

4) If you're going to need to muck about with the system registry, do it like Quicken does. Quicken has a menu item "Backup" which, amazingly enough, backs up all its settings and crud to a file you specify. Then, I reinstall Quicken from the CD, hit "Restore" and give the file name, and it fixes itself. Quicken is full of horrible design choices, but at least they got that right. No other app I've used does that.

5) Never, ever install anything with DRM on it on your work computer. DRM often involves rootkits, installing new drivers that destabilize your system, etc. This includes most game software. Use a separate computer for DRM, one that you won't mind regularly reinstalling Windows on.

There, I feel better now <g>.

In article <e0dmeo$2cmk$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...

>Morals of the story:
>
>1) Keep a crib sheet of all the settings, passwords, serial numbers, registration follderalls, etc.
>
>2) If you're going to provide an update program, fer cryin out loud, make it a monolithic program that doesn't depend on everything else in the OS working perfectly. After all, when you need it, it's probably because the rest of the system isn't right. And if the update program itself is corrupted, then tech support can just send you a new one.
>
>3) If you're writing an app, don't require it to be reinstalled if Windows is reinstalled. DM programs don't need to be. Store your configuration in some text file that can be saved/restored. Please!
>
>4) If you're going to need to muck about with the system registry, do it like Quicken does. Quicken has a menu item "Backup" which, amazingly enough, backs up all its settings and crud to a file you specify. Then, I reinstall Quicken from the CD, hit "Restore" and give the file name, and it fixes itself. Quicken is full of horrible design choices, but at least they got that right. No other app I've used does that.
>
>5) Never, ever install anything with DRM on it on your work computer. DRM often involves rootkits, installing new drivers that destabilize your system, etc. This includes most game software. Use a separate computer for DRM, one that you won't mind regularly reinstalling Windows on.
>
>There, I feel better now <g>.
>
>

6. Change your main system to Linux :-)

After hard time with configuring everything (in www.kubuntu.org) I don't miss
windows any more :-)

BR
Marcin Kuszczak

In article <e0dmeo$2cmk$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...
>Morals of the story:
>
>1) Keep a crib sheet of all the settings, passwords, serial numbers, registration follderalls, etc.
>
>2) If you're going to provide an update program, fer cryin out loud, make it a monolithic program that doesn't depend on everything else in the OS working perfectly. After all, when you need it, it's probably because the rest of the system isn't right. And if the update program itself is corrupted, then tech support can just send you a new one.
>
>3) If you're writing an app, don't require it to be reinstalled if Windows is reinstalled. DM programs don't need to be. Store your configuration in some text file that can be saved/restored. Please!
>
>4) If you're going to need to muck about with the system registry, do it like Quicken does. Quicken has a menu item "Backup" which, amazingly enough, backs up all its settings and crud to a file you specify. Then, I reinstall Quicken from the CD, hit "Restore" and give the file name, and it fixes itself. Quicken is full of horrible design choices, but at least they got that right. No other app I've used does that.
>
>5) Never, ever install anything with DRM on it on your work computer. DRM often involves rootkits, installing new drivers that destabilize your system, etc. This includes most game software. Use a separate computer for DRM, one that you won't mind regularly reinstalling Windows on.
>
>There, I feel better now <g>.
>

6. Change your main system to Linux :-)

After switching to Kubuntu (www.kubuntu.org) I had a hard time with configuration, but now I don't miss Windows at all.

Who can say that Windows is still User Friendly? :-P

BR
Marcin Kuszczak

At some point in the past, the only way to be able to be certified "Windows-logo compatible" was if you used the registry to save your program's settings. I guess they wanted to make it really difficult to switch computers without reinstalling. The registry is probably the worst abomination to come from Redmond and it's the cause of most of the problems Windows has.


Walter Bright wrote:

> A few days ago, Outlook Express starting acting flaky - my account names were forcibly converted to 1, 2, 3, etc., and retyping in the correct ones refused to stick. Then, windows update started failing with useless messages consisting of 8 digit hex numbers.
> 
> So I thought I'd try Microsoft update tech support (which is free for update failures). They asked me to send them logs, which I did. Then, came an endless series of "try this ...", which usually involved unregistering a dozen dlls, rebooting, starting/stopping services, reregistering them, renaming system files, booting in safe mode, wiping directories, deleting files, rebooting, rebooting, all to no avail (except the 8 digit hex number would change).
> 
> Then came the exhortation to run a virus scan, with a couple links. The symantec virus scan crashed after a half hour. The other one completed, and found nothing.
> 
> At this point, it was apparent that tech support had no idea why this was happening, and I was beginning to worry there was either a rootkit installed, or there was just creeping corruption going on. I gave up on Microsoft tech support, and decided to reinstall Windows.
> 
> Do you know it takes THREE HOURS to install Windows from scratch? Gads, you install XP from the CD which requires rebooting several times, then again from the XP SP2 update CD (rebooting n more times), then you log in to Windows update and update/reboot 4 or 5 more times. Why can't Windows Update download everything at once and reboot only once?
> 
> So now I've got Windows reinstalled. Now comes the dance of reinstalling everything else. The worst is, of course, Outlook Express which completely loses track of everything after a reinstall. I have a crib sheet of most of the settings, but even so, there's no way to restore which newsgroup files are read/unread. I also use the undocumented method of finding which gawdawful directory O.E. squirrels the files away in (all in deeply nested hidden directories with 80+ character tty noise filenames) and saving/restoring the dbx files manually.
> 
> Most of the other apps aren't too bad, if you were smart enough to keep a crib sheet of all the serial numbers, registration numbers, and funky passwords. The whole job takes about 12 hours.
> 
> Morals of the story:
> 
> 1) Keep a crib sheet of all the settings, passwords, serial numbers, registration follderalls, etc.
> 
> 2) If you're going to provide an update program, fer cryin out loud, make it a monolithic program that doesn't depend on everything else in the OS working perfectly. After all, when you need it, it's probably because the rest of the system isn't right. And if the update program itself is corrupted, then tech support can just send you a new one.
> 
> 3) If you're writing an app, don't require it to be reinstalled if Windows is reinstalled. DM programs don't need to be. Store your configuration in some text file that can be saved/restored. Please!
> 
> 4) If you're going to need to muck about with the system registry, do it like Quicken does. Quicken has a menu item "Backup" which, amazingly enough, backs up all its settings and crud to a file you specify. Then, I reinstall Quicken from the CD, hit "Restore" and give the file name, and it fixes itself. Quicken is full of horrible design choices, but at least they got that right. No other app I've used does that.
> 
> 5) Never, ever install anything with DRM on it on your work computer. DRM often involves rootkits, installing new drivers that destabilize your system, etc. This includes most game software. Use a separate computer for DRM, one that you won't mind regularly reinstalling Windows on.
> 
> There, I feel better now <g>.

"Juan Jose Comellas" <jcomellas@gmail.com> wrote in message news:e0dtb1$2mld$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> The registry is probably the worst
> abomination to come from Redmond and it's the cause of most of the
> problems
> Windows has.

Hehe, true.  It has some benefits, but for the most part, it just makes it easier to lose all settings for all programs at once.  My registry was corrupted once during a crash.  It was terrible.  Half the programs I had just had to be reinstalled; the rest lost all their settings and/or thought they were unregistered.  And all my Windows settings too.  Woo.

Walter Bright wrote:
> A few days ago, Outlook Express starting acting flaky - my account names were forcibly converted to 1, 2, 3, etc., and retyping in the correct ones refused to stick. Then, windows update started failing with useless messages consisting of 8 digit hex numbers.

Ever thought about running Thunderbird? I've been running it since it first came out and have never had corruption that wasn't my own fault.

-- 
Joel Lucsy
"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program." -- Larry Niven

In article <e0dmeo$2cmk$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...
>
[huge snip]

>There, I feel better now <g>.
>

I feel your pain Walter.

I knew something was fundamentally wrong with Windows when I once told a friend that my (former) windows 98 installation was up and running (and under heavy use) for over 3 years.  His face was aghast as he quipped "how the hell did you do *that*?"

"Blood, sweat and many tears", I replied.

- EricAnderton at yahoo

In article <e0dtb1$2mld$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Juan Jose Comellas says...
>
>At some point in the past, the only way to be able to be certified "Windows-logo compatible" was if you used the registry to save your program's settings. I guess they wanted to make it really difficult to switch computers without reinstalling. The registry is probably the worst abomination to come from Redmond and it's the cause of most of the problems Windows has.

Here's how I look at it.  The registry works fantastic for a few things:

1) Making explorer do file type magic
2) OLE/Drag-and-Drop interoperability (more file type registration and metadata)
3) COM registry
4) Application initalization

.. but design wise it has the following drawbacks:

1) Behaves as its own entity in memory (can you say "cache-thrashing"?)
2) Has its own LRU algorithm and behavior
3) Is prone to bloat, as applications abuse it in various ways

Now if I were to ask a linux/unix guru "does the operating system have any kind of universal configuration storage medium, that is both fast and optimizable?", the answer would be "the filesystem, duh."

I think the registry's #1 problem is that it has put on the winNT kernel, the responsibility of maintaining two separate "filesystems", with completely different interfaces and use characteristics.  As a result, the two compete for the same resources (CPU, Cache, RAM and Disk Bandwidth) rather than cooperate.

Another way to look at it is: what happens to the registry if you're using a program that doesn't talk to it?  Yep, it's still in RAM waiting to be used.

Why they didn't just come up with a universal configuraiton file tree ( /etc anyone? ), with filesystem drivers that feature superior or tree-specific caching, I'll never know.  In every possible way, it would have provided a more stable configuration, for about half as much engineering.

- EricAnderton at yahoo

"pragma" <pragma_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:e0e546$30mt$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> In article <e0dmeo$2cmk$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...
>>
> [huge snip]
>
>>There, I feel better now <g>.
>>
>
> I feel your pain Walter.
>
> I knew something was fundamentally wrong with Windows when I once told a
> friend
> that my (former) windows 98 installation was up and running (and under
> heavy
> use) for over 3 years.  His face was aghast as he quipped "how the hell
> did you
> do *that*?"
>
> "Blood, sweat and many tears", I replied.
>
> - EricAnderton at yahoo

Poor Windows. It does take some stick. Shall I be the only one to come to its defence and say I've never had so much as a crash since Windows 2000? Honestly, all this fuss...

In article <e0e770$21p$1@digitaldaemon.com>, John C says...
>
>"pragma" <pragma_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:e0e546$30mt$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>> In article <e0dmeo$2cmk$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...
>>>
>> [huge snip]
>>
>>>There, I feel better now <g>.
>>>
>>
>> I feel your pain Walter.
>>
>> I knew something was fundamentally wrong with Windows when I once told a
>> friend
>> that my (former) windows 98 installation was up and running (and under
>> heavy
>> use) for over 3 years.  His face was aghast as he quipped "how the hell
>> did you
>> do *that*?"
>>
>> "Blood, sweat and many tears", I replied.
>>
>> - EricAnderton at yahoo
>
>Poor Windows. It does take some stick. Shall I be the only one to come to its defence and say I've never had so much as a crash since Windows 2000? Honestly, all this fuss...

Oh, don't get me wrong.  If there's one thing that Windows does well, it manages to wrangle an absolutely *huge* hardware compatibility listing.  Throw in on top of that the mind-boggling size of the matrix created by drivers, hardware, patches hotfixes and locales, and its a wonder that it doesn't blow up more often than it does.

BTW, I hope to come back to it all by running XP in a vmware environment when I get the chance.  I still need a flexible test platform after all. :)

My major contention with Windows is that it lacks a good failure mode for a lot of stuff that linux/unix users take for granted.  If you happen to touch on a bad combination of the facets mentioned above, you don't boot at all, or get a pretty blue-screen when you least expect it - Safe Mode doesn't always get you back out that mess.

Also, linux is not without its warts too.  I'm having a hell of a time trying to get it to support Nforce3 from a floppy install - AFAIK, it can't be done w/o some serious hacking or using a CD instead.

- EricAnderton at yahoo