Donated 5 More Hours to WinXP Troubleshooting

Skeets on Monday 31 October 2005 05:46

...It's that wrong buttumption that if no error is spewed out, all is "fine and dandy", to use your exact phrasing. The user is never happy to hear a bell or see an unexpected message popping up, so why ever bring it up? Keep it 'behind the scenes'. Leave the user in the dark and let him-her to buttume he-she is the cause for the problem, i.e. ignorance. It serves the reputation of the O-S vendor.

This is one of the things that bothered me a lot when I occasionally used Windows for backups on a friend's computer (volume swap). At least 3 times in my life I spent ~2-hour periods trying to connect two Windows machines via a crossover cable. Sounds trivial, right? Connect the cables, go to Network Neighbourhood and identify the machines...

Well, Windows is erratic and not sufficiently verbose. I suppose it had something to do with anomaly in Windows versions, which in principle must not exist as there should be known protocols for communication defined. In all 3 occasions, one computer could eventually identify the other, but the reason for 'success' was unknown. Point of contact would appear and disap- pear for no obvious reasons. Can one debug? Hell no. The O-S is not only quiet, but it will also refuse to say what is happening underneath. Expen- diture of 6 hours was enough for me to recoil in disgust. This was one among many reasons1 why my life had to be 100% Microsoft-free. I needed something reliable and predictable. Not a Russian roulette.

Roy

1 Other reasons include limit on file path length = 256 bytes; Failed booting on occasions (fragility); Poor remote access capabilities; Long troubleshooting times like the OP pointed out (in the same amount of time, one could write his-her own program for the task).

-- Roy S. Schestowitz Useless fact: ~70% of organisms are bacteria 8:30am up 66 days 14:19, 4 users, load average: 0.40, 0.45, 0.54