Microsoft Windows: A Culture of Mediocrity
February 6th, 2009
This is a giant rant with a small point at the end. So be warned.
Earlier this week, I booted up Windows for the first time in a few months. About 2 minutes after it came up, just after I had started up an app, it informed me that it desperately needed to restart because it had applied some updates, and unless I clicked cancel, it would. So I restarted.
The Saga Begins
Then I opened up the program for my negative scanner. This device has an infrared dust-detection system that is not well supported in SANE. I can insert a 6-frame negative, it will load it in, identify where the 6 frames are, and scan it at 4000 DPI. So anyhow, I opened it up and started scanning. Surprisingly, it was REALLY SLOW. Normally it takes about 3 minutes per frame, and I could tell it wasn’t going to do that. It sounded as if the computer couldn’t keep up with the scanner.
I tried to get Windows to tell me if it was talking to the scanner at USB 2.0 speeds, but this information was nowhere to be found. So I went down under my desk and moved some USB devices to different ports. Got back up from under the desk, and:
BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH was there.
Reboot. Scanner now works at normal speed. So I started it scanning, then went off to watch the Purdue game with Terah. Came back a little while later, expecting it to be ready for the next negative, only to manage to catch it in the nick of time before it “helpfully” rebooted my machine again due to — yes — more updates. So I saved, rebooted, and finally scanning worked after that. Also I disabled automatic installation of updates.
A Turn For The Worse
A few days later, I was getting expecting a new camcorder, and I was planning to use Windows for video editing. Originally, my hard disk had Windows, a Windows “emergency recovery” partition, and Linux on it. When I upgraded my motherboard and added a SATA HDD, I moved almost all of Linux to it. So there was now a lot of free space on that original drive, and the recovery partition is useless with the new motherboard anyhow.
So I figure: delete that recovery partition, and expand the NTFS partition to take up the whole of the disk. Easy enough, right?
So I do this, and much to my annoyance, Windows now refused to boot. It would just hang. No boot menu, no splash screen. Just hang. Linux saw and could access the NTFS partition just fine.
So I went hunting for my XP install CD. Finally found it. Boot off the thing. It spends 5 minutes loading drivers for all sorts of things I don’t have off the CD, then promptly crashes, saying “inaccessible boot device.” A hunch or two later and I’m twiddling bits in the BIOS to try to get it to see my SATA DVD burner properly. No luck. I finally download the drivers for my chipset from Gigabyte, have to use Wine to extract them, then scrounge up a working floppy to put them on. Reboot. Blue screen again — but a different one. Twiddle some more bits in the BIOS. Reboot. Success! Recovery console is mine!
I run chkdsk, and fixboot, which everybody in the forums says will fix this.
Neither made any difference at all, but the recovery console could see the NTFS partition just fine. Grumble.
More googling, and I try testdisk for Linux. It twiddled some bits on the NTFS boot sector and my partition table. Reboot. And — UGH. Now Linux won’t even boot and Grub won’t start. Download Debian live CD. Boot from it. Inspect disk with fdisk. Turns out testdisk just renumbered my partitions. Restore the previous numbering: Windows on partition 2, Linux /boot on partition 5. Save, reboot. Grub is back. Linux boots. Try Windows. And….
Still hangs, but this time only after saying that HAL.DLL is missing or corrupt.
Reboot into Linux. HAL.DLL is right there where it should be, and at the size it should be. Ponder this for a bit.
I then tried looking at boot.ini. On a lark, I wondered if deleting the recovery partition meant that boot.ini no longer considers Windows to be partition 2, even though that’s what the partition table says. Change it to partition 1, save. Reboot. SUCCESS IS MINE! WINDOWS BOOTS! Only 4 hours after expanding its partition.
I told some friends about this trouble booting. “What on earth did you do, John?” “I expanded the NTFS partition.” And the response: “Ahh. That’ll do it.”
Expanding a partition is something we do routinely on Linux. Even on running production servers. Even WHILE THEY’RE RUNNING. And I never have a problem like this. And even if I did, I wouldn’t have to use some tool written FOR A DIFFERENT OS to fix it.
Argh.
The Problems Multiply
A few days later, I got a new Canon Vixia HG20 camcorder. It shoots in AVCHD format — 1920×1280@60i, h.264, which is a standard format for hard disk or SD card HD camcorders. I needed some basic video editing software that would let me do simple edits and burn a BDMV or AVCHD disc onto DVD+R — formats that Blu-ray players can play, yet are cheap to make.
After poking around, I decided to download the free trial of Ulead/Corel VideoStudio Pro X2. The free trial supposedly was the full version of the program, though it quite obviously wasn’t after installing it. So I bought the full version — and was greeted by about an 800MB download instead of the 120MB “full version free trial” download.
Now here’s the thing about VideoStudio Pro X2. IT’S CRAP. It has crashed on me at least two dozen times, usually when I click the Play button. Its interface is really clunky. There’s no way to mark a start and an end point, and say “just delete everything between there, regardless of what clips they’re in.” The AVCHD disc creator wants to re-encode the entire project, even though it’s ALREADY IN AVCHD. Though you can work around that by exporting the entire project to an AVCHD *FILE* — which is smart enough not to re-encode it — then making a disc from that.
The project properties likes to say I’m editing 720×480 even when I’m editing 1920×1080, and doesn’t even have a box for 1920×1080. Though after some Googling, it turns out that the project properties settings are irrelevant anyway. Yay for good design?
So after all this crashing, I went out and did some more Googling. I found this lovely quote:
In short, every application I and our Labs’ tester tried–iMovie, Pinnacle Studio, Ulead Video Studio, Sony Vegas and Avid Liquid–at best could open but barely play some clips, and more often simply hung or crashed.
So what we have here is a whole culture of mediocrity. Everybody advertises that they work with AVCHD, yet nobody actually… WORKS with AVCHD. And this is the format that the industry is rapidly moving to for HD — HDV’s days are quite numbered.
Categories: Uncategorized
“A hunch or two later and I’m twiddling bits in the BIOS to try to get it to see my SATA DVD burner properly.”
Fixed in Vista with proper AHCI drivers already on disk.
“And I never have a problem like this. And even if I did, I wouldn’t have to use some tool written FOR A DIFFERENT OS to fix it.”
Fixed in Vista/Win7, check out Disk Management under Computer Management in Admin tools.
Of course, lots of different things are broken in Vista, but most of them now work again in Win7 – I do sympathize though, keeping track of partitions/drives by offset is pretty dumb.
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Well, there you go.
You only have to shell out another $1xx dollars to get it all fixed, by replacing your entire operating system with the latest windows crap.
(slaps head)
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Wait a second, you are using an operating system that was released when??? Have you tried using Linux kernels/packages that were around at the time XP was released? And you are complaining?
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John Goerzen Reply:
February 7th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
August 2004 for SP2. Vista’s only been out what — a year now? And I’ve been applying updates ever since.
I would have been using Debian sarge (prerelease) in that timeframe. Yes, I’ve been using Linux for ages, and I’ve got to say that Linux in 2004 would not have given me these problems.
Also I think things would have been only marginally better in Vista (SATA drivers). AFAICT, the “restart required” disease is no better in Vista.
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I agree with Ramesh. Even though there were some [3] service packs released, they aren’t relevant to the topic. The OS is old. Very much old.
The problem, as you put it in your post, is not about any culture or any mediocrity. It’s about not knowing the limitations of a given OS. I, for example, used Linux for a good year, without even having a XP installation on my computer. It’s irrelevant to mention the number of times I broke xorg.conf — which I had to edit because I somehow couldn’t switch to a resolution above 800×600.
Every OS has it’s glitches. You just have to know better :p There are unrecommended practices. Don’t try them at home. Or just know better and be prepared to fix things.
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I stopped using windows because of all the blue screen rebooting, it just became a useless tool.
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@Ramesh
You’re acting as if the state of Windows XP has remained completely static since release, and worse, that this is some sort of excuse for it failing.
1. Windows XP has had 3 service packs, and it still has many of the problems it did at release (why the F*CK can’t you mount iso images?)
2. The Linux/Gnome feature sets, and usability have grown incredibly fast while still maintaining the quality. Whereas Windows strove only to patch holes (The are only now unraveling kernel dependencies, and implementing fine grained object level, locking).
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