Frustration, thy name is Windows...
You know what, I am a pretty patient when it comes to technological challenges. I will work around most issues, and do more than what an average joe will put up with. Primarily, this is because I know how hard it is to design good software. But I pretty much hit my limit today. The source of my frustration - the completely inane support capabilities built into Microsoft Vista (and I suspect the previous versions as well). Let me explain the neat little conundrum that Microsoft decided to test my patience with. For the last couple of days, my laptop has been acting up, where all of a sudden the screen will go black, and pretty much the only thing I can do is hard power down the machine. After a relatively light weekend (by my standards), today things just imploded, where the machine would barely boot before it would conk out. So I started the machine up in "Safe Mode" and started trying to figure out what to do. Going on some forums pointed me to a few knowledgebase articles, that recommended some hotfix downloads. Here is where the fun started. You can't download the hotfix unless your windows version is validated as being genuine. But the activex control on the windows site relies for this on a service running on your machine, and that service will not run in "Safe Mode". Trying to start it gives you a nice little message telling you to start the machine in Normal Mode. But I wouldn't be trying to download the hotfix if I could do that! I tried downloading the hotfix from another machine, and transferring it to the laptop. But then installing the hotfix failed because of "Safe Mode". So I needed to do something else. I figured the best approach would be to update the display driver. NVidia's website was no help at all. Their "beta" utility to detect my display type failed, and their manual download mechanism wouldn't locate the right driver. Further searches on forums suggested that I use windows update to check for official driver updates. Going to the website recommended that I use the utility on my machine. But again that machine does not run in "Safe Mode". What did I end up doing? I kept rebooting the machine till I managed to start it in Normal Mode long enough to run windows update and download and install the updated driver. That was a fun 5 hours. Seems to be working so far, but I have to say that it really made me reconsider the quality of Microsoft's engineering. I don't understand how they could have created a process with these kind of contradictions built into it. Maybe all those guys develop on Linux or OS X.
