Going Closed Source Day 2
Posted by: Quintin in GoingClosedSource, Software, Tech, Windows, tags: Closed Source, WhatwasIthinking, Win7, Windows 7If you missed day one of my trek through closed country read it here: Day One
Right, so day one - getting to grips with Windows, did not go well. Day 2 did not start out good either. I had to go back to Linux in order to do my morning tasks in the office because I AM STILL WITHOUT OFFICE!
>deep breath< Windows locked up on me again this morning. I could actually access the drive, but the moment I entered the product key for Office 2007 the machine locked up.
To get grub back I had to install Linux on a spare partition (Windows trashed my bootloader when I installed it) and that took exactly 15 minutes on this machine. With the same DVD rom that Windows regularly locks up with.
Other programs
I could not finish dowloading Putty last night, and this morning haven’t tried again. Right now I am going to download Skype - which is not a biggie for me since I use it in Linux as well.
Then Putty. I wonder of that is OSS? If someone out there knows give me a headsup. (Authorization Dialog blocked the screen while typing)
I am with a client who has a virus loose on their network. Although I have Bitdefender installed my heart skips a beat everytime a flash-drive comes near my computer. I just feal uneasy, is it really possible that people can live and work like this? And be okay with it??
I have been kicking myself since yesterday for going on this adventure, and people live like this?!
I find it really hard to believe.
13:55
UAC has started to really annoy me. To install skype I have to click save, yes I want to save, run, yes I want to run, etc.
Okay so now my DVD rom is missing. I inserted the OFFICE install disk, Explorer locked up, I suspended my laptop for 30 minutes and when I woke it up I could install. But the installation failed and now the drive is missing.
Ah, pop out the disk and it magically reappears! JOY!
14:01
Right forget about office until I get past the urge to eat the disk. Pop in a CD with some of my favourite MP3’s to get my mind of things for a bit…
No lockup, but I cannot detect the disk… If the DVDrom did not work flawelessly in Vista and Linux I would have suspected a problem with it by now - but it is fine. And honestly this is the main source of frustration for me. I would have felt a lot better if I could use it properly…
Bing Search
Okay so I decide to go hunting for drivers, maybe my issue with the DVDrom is driver related… Since I am going MS and closed source I have to do a BING search instead of Google.
I type in ‘Samsung r509 drivers laptop’ and the first page of hits have not one result for drivers, but tons of results for where I can buy one of these beauties. I would take a screenshot but I am seriously afraid of another lockup.
Only by page 2 do I get two results related to drivers for my laptop… weird. (BTW as I am typing this Explorer is busy conking out because of my insistance that it reads the disk in the drive…)
And now the DRIVE DISAPPEARS AGAIN!!!
Sigh. Sorry.
14:14
So I click the eject button and the drive reappears in Explorer, but does not eject. For some reason it works again. Let me try and play some music…
Nope Explorer locks up again…
My driver search is so far fruitless. I have come across a Vista related forum that I am reading through…
It reccomends flashing the firmware. Yeah I am not going to do that right now…
14:34
This seems to be a problem with the RC of Win7 with the particular drive I have, the best “fix” I can find is to upgrade from Vista instead of clean install… not going to do that right now either…
I must say I really like the color grouping of Tabs that IE8 has.
16:00
AHA! It was not my DVDrom after all!
There is a known issue with Win7 and some DVDroms. After a few hours of using the utterly useless BING search engine I came across (IE Stopped Working here and needed to be closed) this article regarding Win7 and DVD drives:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Windows-7-RTM-Can-Render-DVD-Drives-Inaccessible-121924.shtml
I had to dive into command prompt to the commands in that article to get my DVDrom to work.
Let me be the one to say this: WINDOWS WILL NOT BE DESKTOP READY UNTIL YOU DON’T NEED TO USE THE COMMAND PROMPT TO GET YOUR MACHINE TO WORK!
I am busy installing Office 2007 at this moment. For some reason I cannot get a music CD to play…
17:32
Right so now I have office installed. For some reason there is now a noticeable slowdown with performance on my machine. New programs take much longer to open. Weird. (Internet Explorer has stopped responding…)
I can play music CD. For some reason when listening to one though I cannot edit this Blog post. I had to exit Windows Media Player to type this. Specifically it seems that the SHIFT key stops working.
How do people live with this rubbish?
Onward to: Day Three
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Yes, Putty is open source (MIT) — http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/licence.html
Google (oh sorry, you can’t) for “putty”. First link has “License”, which is that page
Dang. That means I can’t use it! I tried “Binging” for Putty, and finally Putty License.
Bing search is not very intuitive, but I got to a few license related pages, the one you listed was about third or fourth down the results.
Thanks for the reply!
Continuing from Day 1, what the holy hell is wrong with your computer, man!?
Why are you installing GRUB? It makes me think you’re doing some kind of crazy dual-boot situation here instead of using just Windows 7, and it’s likely that your bootloader and Windows 7 aren’t compatible with each other. Either way, it’s definitely not in the spirit of the experiment.
You’re unlucky enough to happen to have the one model of DVD-ROM drive that Windows has issues with, but note that the fix is to flash the DVD drive’s firmware– does that indicate the problem is Microsoft’s fault? Or a problem with the firmware? (My guess: the latter.) I know blame doesn’t help when you have a malfunctioning computer, but at the same time it’s unfair to blame Windows 7 for firmware bugs.
Anyway, imagine how I feel, since I’ve yet to find a Linux distribution that works with sleep/suspend on my Tablet PC without crashing when it wakes back up.
Same theme here: there’s no way Windows is locking up that much unless your hardware is faulty as shit. Your description is such that I’m starting to just think you made it all up… or if IE stops responding for more than 2 seconds you declare it “locked” and hard-reboot it.
Windows Media Player stops the Shift key from working? Seriously? You’re making shit up.
Hi James.
Again, the problem is not with the firmware, there is a known bug in Win7 with certain DVD Roms.
I did not need to flash the firmware, I fixed a setting in Win7 - ergo Win7 is at fault.
No I was not making shit up either.
And if you take the time to carefully read my posts in this series you will notice that I was really trying to be as fair and balanced as possible. Read Day7 for a case in point.