Sunday, December 30, 2007 12:49 PM
I was planning to write an article about software quality, but I had some technical problems that prevented me. Which, I figure, is in itself a quality issue. It's not my aim, in this blog, to pick on specific products or bad user experience, but, when those problems are part of a major new operating system by the largest software vendor in the world, I thought that perhaps I should make an exception.
Y'know, I was really starting to like Vista.
It was slow, but it sure was pretty. I liked the way the new Start menu managed its size. I liked the wizbang Aero UI. I liked having a filesystem search function that a/ worked, b/ worked fast, and c/ did not try to hide its deficiencies behind an cute animated dog.
No compatibility issues; all of my old software and my peripherals worked great. I use my machine for image processing and publication design stuff as well as for development, and everything worked great... for about 3 weeks.
Last week Windows Defender started reporting problems. Couldn't update itself. I couldn't work out why--I hadn't changed any policies or anything--but I really didn't spend a lot of time looking into it. Defender is about as useful as teats on a bull and, frankly, I was pleased that it was no longer wasting bandwidth.
Friday, I shut the machine down in the morning, and when I started it up again in the afternoon I couldn't connect to the internet. I was connected to my local wireless network, but I had no IP address. Further investigation revealed that a number of services, including the DHCP client, the Diagnostic Policy Service, and the Time service had failed to start. I couldn't start them manually, either--access denied. This was puzzling; I hadn't changed any policies or access rights. I enabled the Administrator account--that didn't work. I turned UAC off--that didn't work. Nothing in the event logs. Nothing peculiar reported by the Sysinternals Process Monitor. I pored through the registry. I trawled forums and found that many other people had experienced this problem, but nobody had a solution that was applicable to my setup. No domain auth problems, no corrupt or missing drivers, nothing.
Then the Windows Firewall (I know, I know...) started reporting problems: the driver service didn't exist or was marked for deletion. Well, that was peculiar--I could see it running just fine.
Somehow the permissions of the local system had gotten screwed up, and the problem was worsening. UAC started turning itself back on after several reboots. Computers do not magically hose themselves. I annoys me every time some civlian says "It just stopped working" or "it broke", as if they couldn't possibly have caused it. But there I was, wondering what kind of demon had possesed the box. Which of course suggested spyware. But how? I work in the anti-malware industry and I couldn't locate any kind of infestation. Perhaps a bad update from my antivirus or antispyware software? Sounds likely--this is the reason I don't use any of the products I work on on my own box. If we seriously mess something up, I don't want at least my own machine to be harmed when I can least afford it. So I uninstalled my security software, but that wasn't it.
Back to the forums: the only remaining solution was to reinstall the OS.
I thought about it for a while. A number of my colleagues--IT professionals who love new toys--have been downgrading from Vista after only a few days. A couple of them love it, but most of them seemed unduly skeptical of it... or so it seemed to me at the time. I thought about it for a bit more.
This really is the first time in many many years that I've had a support issue on my own box that's left me stumped. It's a brand new machine, and it lasted three weeks before something mysterious started tearing down my OS. I thought some more. This machine is three times as powerful as my old one, but usual suite of apps have been running at much the same speed--that can only be attributable to the OS. What was Vista giving me in exchange for the performance cost? Fancy UI, a marginally better file explorer, and the likelihood that I would again suffer these same dyspraxic problems at some point?
So now I've gone back to XP. It's cost me another day, but I have everything mostly set up again now, everything us running noticeably faste,r and I'm pretty sure the system isn't going to start locking bits of itself away from other bits for no discernible reason. Maybe I'll try it out again next time I have set up a machine, if the Service Pack is out, but I'm back on the road in another week or so and I can't risk having to rebuild it--again--while I'm overseas. If I get the urge to play around in the meantime, perhaps I'll put XP 64 back on.
-- JF