开云体育

The state of software is a royal mess and is getting worse.

I had an old Thinkpad T60 with Win7 which I was using as a lab bench machine, mostly downloading pdf files of parts for troubleshooting. The disk started to have problems and I was unable to reinstall the OS, despite the worthless product key. I installed Linux on a new drive and all was well, until Linux one day booted to some command line. Nobody could help me recover the OS and guess what? To get the files I downloaded required buying some $65 utility. Gee, I was able to very easily do that from the Windows disk. Start from scratch using another laptop, scrap that one.

Last night my wife asked me to make a copy of a CD with a bunch of files. Easy, right? All built into Win10. I first copy the files to a temp directory, then put a blank CD in. Then I get the option to make a data CD, name it, then move the files to that window. So far so good, and it tells me the files are to be copied to the CD. But there is no button or menu item to start the process! I Google it and it shows the option, but it’s not there on my system. So I remove the CD and put it back in as a last resort and sure enough the option is now shown. WTF? How much do they check this stuff? Making a copy in XP or 7 was foolproof, why did they break it?


Peter

On Jul 26, 2019, at 11:09 AM, Tom Gardner <tggzzz@...> wrote:

On 26/07/19 14:50, Peter Gottlieb wrote:
Support for an OS has several angles.

I would hope the negotiated deal for a piece of equipment with an embedded OS would have a lifetime, fully transferrable license for that piece of equipment. So your Win2k scope should have the rights to use that OS until the instrument is scrapped.

I don’t think Microsoft should be forced into infinite support in the form of security updates, although they sort of secretly do for Win2k and XP, if you set the registry flag indicating they are in a bank ATM. But even that can’t last forever. However, if the scope is operated standalone or on a very well protected network as a practical matter a lack of updates doesn’t matter.

In reality it is worse than that; here's three Microsoft horror stories...

Once, while WinXP was still fully supported, I had an "interesting" experience with a Samsung netbook after its hard disk failed. Printed on the underside of the netbook were the WinXP licence and the xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxx product key.

I bought a new hard disk and installed it, then used an external CDROM drive to re-install WinXP from my own WinXP installation CDROM, using the product key on the bottom of the netbook.

WinXP installed in the usual way, quite successfully, as expected.

But when I first rebooted I was confronted by an unfamiliar DOS-box window, which said "Microsoft" at the top and "shan't boot into WinXP because the product key was wrong". What the...?! WinXP had just installed correctly.

I contacted Microsoft, and their service person said it was a Samsung problem, even though this was clearly a Microsoft display.

I contacted Samsung, and their service person said it was a Microsoft problem, quite reasonably IMHO. (But they did try to weasel out by asking the disk drive's manufacturer; the original was Western Digital (!) and by chance the replacement was Samsung)

In the end the only solution would have been to buy another a new hard disk from Samsung, with WinXP pre-installed.

Bugger that; I installed Linux and the 10 year old netbook continues to work well with an excellent battery life since the I set the BIOS to only charge it to 80% of capacity.



The second horror story is Microsoft's PlaysForSure (TM) music. Since Microsoft have turned their servers, you can't move the music you purchased to another hard disk. Makes a mockery of "PlaysForSure", despite Microsoft claiming it was merely "pining for the fjords"


The third horror story happened this month: Microsoft closed down its ebooks platform. It has offered a refund, plus a bit if your carefully curated bookmarks have gone up in aetherial smoke.


See a pattern?