Spinor Info

… two days and several scraped fingers later (after I also lost, no doubt, many braincells to aggravation, not to mention hours of useful operating time of my heart muscle measured by a number considerably greater than the 48 or so that have elapsed since I first discovered that my computer is in trouble) I am finally back in business. All because of a bleeping 10 cent capacitor. But before I complain too loud, I quickly remind myself that during these 48 hours or so, tens if not hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of people around the world were killed, died of starvation, lost their most loved ones, lost their freedom, lost their possessions, you name it… and I am complaining because I had to replace a stupid motherboard and bring my computer back to life?

No, I am not complaining. Still, the last two days were a time I could have done without.

What a bloody joyful day. My main computer is dead this morning. It now even fails to boot. Annoyingly, I don’t have any external SATA enclosures that would allow me to hook one of its drives up to another computer to check for signs of trouble, verify data integrity, and last but not least, make a backup (my last backup is a few days old.) So it’s a trip to the nearest computer store. And once I’m done, my main computer will still be dead, it’s just that I’ll no longer need to worry about what was stored on it (except for the numerous applications, configuration settings, etc…) This is NOT going to be a fun day. Miserable outside, too.

Yes, they are nice. I spent several hours (!) today on the phone with Microsoft, and they really tried to help. In the end, my issue with installing KB958624 remains unresolved but they acknowledged the problem, suggested meaningful ways to deal with it, and promised that it will be researched and that I will be notified.

More importantly, they listened to my comments concerning Activation. This young, very polite engineer from India with impeccable English listened intently and took notes, appreciating my basic concern: Activation (and copy protection in general) will not stop piracy, but it alienates a company’s best friends, namely its paying customers.

Microsoft is really pissing me off these days. While necessary, their updates suck.

I’m restarting a VISTA machine about the seventeenth time already, because if I try to install all available updates, all of them fail with an undocumented error, even though I can install them one-by-one.

I’ve installed several updates on an XP laptop, and four of them failed; I tried again, then they succeeded. No apparent reason for the difference.

I’ve installed a bunch of updates on another XP machine, but a few were left out. I installed those, too (Root Certificates and Office 2007 Help updates.) Windows didn’t ask for a restart, but the browser went half-dead afterwards anyhow, so I had to restart.

Meanwhile, I’ve just restarted that VISTA machine again.

You’d think that after all these years, Microsoft would be better at this. But they aren’t. One of these days, they’re going to release a patch that will shut down three hundred million computers around the world and cause more economic damage than the current recession. Then, they’ll call it “behavior by design” and charge us more for support.

Update: I’ve narrowed down the problem to a single update, KB958624. It fails to complete installation after reboot, and upon this failure, the system reverts other updates as well. I have attempted to contact Microsoft about this using their Web based e-mail form; I dutifully completed all the requisite fields, only to be informed after I clicked the last Continue that the requested page is not available. Congratulations, Microsoft, for a professional job well done.