Sam I am

Over the weekend, I read that  Tom West passed away. The Tracy Kidder book, The Soul of A New Machine, chronicled the creation of a microcomputer at Data General in the late 1970s. I still own the copy that my parents gave me in high school. 20 years later, I still think about the engineers that worked on that machine. The Soul of A New Machine was one of the reasons why I became a software engineer, and Tom West was a role model.

The other day I wrote about having to reinstall Patti’s laptop from the factory defaults because Windows started to indicate that it was no longer licensed. The good news is that I finally got the laptop running well.

After installing the 15 remaining updates before and fully processing the removed antiquated programs, Windows started to work again. After that it was a matter of “simply” installing the remaining patches. It looks six or seven reboots with around 60-70 more patches to bring Windows up to a fully secure and patched version. Two of the reboots were due to service pack installations; they also required me to visit the computer more than once in order to install the patch–I had to agree to a license agreement. Similarly, I was prompted explicitly to install both Internet Explorer 8 and then Internet Explorer 9. There was no way for me to indicate to the operating system, “Please install all of the updates and keep updating until the system is fully patched and secure.” In addition, it was not possible to do one batch download of all of the updates. The final several reboots only consisted of five or six patches each.

Once the system was fully patched, I was able to install a copy of Microsoft Office for Home and Students. That installation went smoothly. I also installed several applications using the Google Pack–it’s an easy way to install a bunch of applications without having to worry about updating them manually later. I believe her laptop is fully patched at this point. It appears to be snappier, and I hope that it will continue to work correctly.

Patti has been using a Dell Inspiron 1720 for the past three years. I took at a look at a year or so ago; I made sure that it had up-to-date anti-virus software, upgraded the memory, ran all Windows updates, and set up automatic security updates. A month or so ago, Windows started complaining that it was no longer authentic. And then it started disabling features: the background became black, external drives no longer worked correctly, and the computer seemed to take longer and longer to start up.

Today, I worked for several hours trying to fix the problem. I was unable to figure out which specific patch interacted poorly with windows, so after three or four hours of troubleshooting I backed up Patti’s files and reinstalled from the recovery disk. I had been reluctant to reinstall, because Patti had also purchased Microsoft Word. We’re going to have to find those CDs to reinstall as well.

After reinstalling, the system appeared to be fine. I started to download the 300 MB of security updates (86 of 86), disabled the expired and antiquated anti-virus, and installed a modern anti-virus problem. After several hours of re-installation, the computer again started to report Windows Genuine Advantage validation problems.

I started chatting with Microsoft. We worked through around 15 minutes of troubleshooting before the connection died.

There appears to be another batch of 15 updates; I’m hoping that these updates fix the problem. It looks like the problem is caused by a Microsoft or Dell update that has moved a “protected” file from the expected location. However, even though Microsoft requires that files be in specific states and specific locations, the “protection” software does not give any easy way to see the offending application.

This has been a frustrating experience. The laptop was legitimately purchased; the Microsoft software was legitimately purchased. Why do they feel it’s okay for their software to break in this manner with little or no recourse?