Blaster worm woes
The Fog of XP
Reading “Blaster worm woes” lead me to “The Fog of XP”, which put a nice little catchphrase on a major source of XP-annoyance for me.
I too am stumbling in the Fog of XP.
My wife’s PC has been hanging by a thread ever since I inherited the beast and installed XP on it (all bright-eyed about using Microsoft’s latest greatest OS). It’s a homebrew computer, which may explain my woes to some extent. No slight on those that built the computer, but there’s always additional quality risks when purchasing parts a la carte.
Over the course of this saga, I’ve reconfigured the hard drive jumpers (apparently that particular model had issues with XP when in certain configurations), replaced the memory (the XP upgrade was freezing part way through the installation process), upgraded the BIOS (the motherboard is an ASUS KV7) and fiddled with video card drivers.
The computer is currently comatose. Even when fully functional, rebooting was a walk on the wild side - I can’t remember the last time the computer booted up without a hitch. Most of the time selecting “Roll back to last known good state” worked. Until one day it didn’t, which lead to the current comatose state.
I’m going to replace the video card (an old 16MB Nvidia TNT 2 card) in a blind stab at solving the problem. Every time I fix something (the hard drives, the memory, etc.) I think, “that’s it, things should stabilize now.” But alas, they don’t. Same old same old, “roll back to last known good state.”
I have no idea what’s being rolled back, what state the system is in in terms of updates and patches, etc. And tracking down updated drivers for the various pieces of hardware is a nightmare - visiting different vendor web sites, drilling down through their various navigational systems (which vary wildly in terms of ease of use), and then getting the driver installer onto a system that, at best, limps along.
I mean, I’m a relatively competent guy when it comes to dealing with computers. I’ve been working on them since the early days of DOS. And I feel absolutely befuddled. What happens to the average user when confronted with this? I know they don’t have the patience for tracking down drivers or re-configuring jumper switches.
On the plus side, the computer’s comatose state means that I missed out on the whole Win32 Blaster loveliness (though hopefully our firewall would’ve protected the PC anyhow).
In conclusion: Windows fans - explain to me again why Windows XP makes PCs almost as easy to use as/easier to use than Macs? All of this extra work justifies saving a few bucks up front?
Recent Comments