You would think I would know better than to let Windows update a perfectly working video card driver, especially when the card is old and the drivers haven't changed for several years, and especially when it is Windows XP. Yet, stupidly, I did. My excuse is that I had been fiddling around with disabling and then re-enabling some hardware drivers for my two audio cards in an attempt to get them to play nicely together (which they eventually did, I am happy to say). This update was the first one since, so I suppose I assumed that I had inadvertently triggered some update mechanism in the video card driver too.

Windows said the current driver was old and would I like to update to a Microsoft current one? Yes. Update goes ahead, reboot, and...nothing but VGA. Yikes! Little did I know I would now be in for a two hour saga of trying to fix it.

First, try to update the driver using the Hardware Manager. No dice, the driver is current. Rubbish, I know it is isn't. Then, go to ATI's website to pull the latest and install that. No, Windows won't have it, the existing driver is current. And so it goes, on and on.

Of course, it is not helped by having to reboot between each and every change. Each test cycle takes about five minutes, most of which is shutting down and starting back up.

Eventually in frustration, I uninstall all video drivers, including the VGA one, and reboot. This time, for some unknown reason and why it is different from the 10 or so reboots before I don't know, Windows detects new hardware and installs current drivers. And they work! Hoo-bloody-ray.

I still don't know why Windows thought the driver needed updating. But it shits me that it cost two hours of my time to fix. And having to reboot? Ridiculous. I can insert and remove driver modules in a Linux kernel any time I want without rebooting.

Lesson learnt for the hundredth time: don't let Windows update legacy drivers that work.

]]> http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=effingwindows%21201111051012%21microsoft/feed/ http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=top2musthavewindows%21201109050900%21general%2Cmicrosoft http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=top2musthavewindows%21201109050900%21general%2Cmicrosoft#comments Mon, 05 Sep 2011 09:00:00 -0700 Nick general microsoft http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=top2musthavewindows%21201109050900%21general%2Cmicrosoft/ There are only two must-have tools for Windows that are on my machines. If you are running an OS later than XP (Vista or 7), then there is only one.

Windows is let down by a poor file management tool. It tries to push file management into a quasi browser, Explorer, and the result is a bad compromise.

The first thing I do on any Windows machine is install xplorer² from Zabkat, a small software company run by a chap called Nikos. There is a free lite version and a subscription-based fully featured version. If you are a command line guru from the unix world, spring for the full featured version: the list of features is huge, you can read them here. If you don't need all those features, the free lite version will still provide much better file management and exploring abilities than the default Windows Explorer; two-pane browsing alone is worth it.

I've been using xplorer² for about a decade and bought a licence several years ago. It is the best file management utility I've found. It is even better than the various unix ones and I wish there was a port of it for Linux.

The other thing that lets older Windows down is poor file searching. This doesn't apply to Windows 7 which has a good fast file searcher, or, to a lesser degree, Vista which has a reasonable file searcher. However, if you are using Windows XP, the file searcher is a dog and needs to be replaced.

There are a couple of utilities that bring the full power of regular expressions, date and time, file size and so on to the searching mechanism. One of them is Everything and the other is Locate32. They are both free of charge and Locate32 is also open source with a BSD licence. Both provide similar functions, albeit with different approaches.

Everything sets up a service that monitors the NTFS filesystem and updates its database every time a file changes. It won't monitor networked drives and it is persistent in memory. It uses up too much RAM for my liking, about 45MB for 1,000,000 files, but because its database is in RAM it is very quick. Personally, I would rather not have a service continually using RAM when I may use the program only once a week or so.

Locate32 doesn't sit in memory. It updates its database to whenever you set it, say once a day. The main benefit for me over Everything is that it can also locate files by their contents (like grep in the unix world), so you can do things like search for all .txt or .doc files that contain "foo" and are more recent than 7 days old. (Note that xplorer² can do this too in the professional version.) That makes it a deal-beater for me, so I choose Locate32.

You can try any of these utilities for free (xplorer² has a 30-day free trial for the professional version). Give them a go and make your Windows desktop experience much less of a hassle.

]]> http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=top2musthavewindows%21201109050900%21general%2Cmicrosoft/feed/ http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=microsoftvistaupgradebackup%21201001260952%21microsoft http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=microsoftvistaupgradebackup%21201001260952%21microsoft#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:52:00 -0700 Nick microsoft http://www.nickcoleman.org/blog/index.cgi?post=microsoftvistaupgradebackup%21201001260952%21microsoft/ I usually hesitate to write about Microsoft, because it's too easy a target, you're invariably preaching to the converted, and there's a million other people saying the same thing.

This one, however, just makes me shake my head¹.

Microsoft is offering a Family version of an upgrade to Windows 7. It allows you to upgrade three computers with one upgrade purchase.

Get this. The upgrade removes any previous capability you had to back up to a remote machine. Yep, you can't backup to another machine on your LAN, nor can you backup to a dedicated backup storage unit. You can only backup to the local machine.

For almost all casual users, backup to the local machine means backup to the same disk as the originals.

Backups serve two purposes: you can recover from your error when you accidentally delete a file; you can recover from a hardware failure when you can't access your data.

What is the single most common hardware failure of data? The disk drive. Which is where your backups are.

What on earth are they thinking? More relevant, what sort of mind process goes on in their marketing area? "Yes, let's remove the ability for a user to safely store their data." Unless you pay an extra $200 for the next higher upgrade, which does allow you to backup remotely.

We have become used to Microsoft's marketing tactics which do things like arbitrarily limit the operating system's capabilities. XP vs XP Pro's networking ability, for example.

But when Microsoft endangers your data purely as a marketing tactic, that is a new low, even for them.

See The Australian for the full article. Note Microsoft's weasel words to explain their rational.