{"id":151,"date":"2005-09-07T09:12:00","date_gmt":"2005-09-07T15:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.codedread.com\/archives\/2005\/09\/07\/windows-a-hack-job\/"},"modified":"2005-09-07T09:12:00","modified_gmt":"2005-09-07T15:12:00","slug":"windows-a-hack-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/09\/07\/windows-a-hack-job\/","title":{"rendered":"Windows: A Hack Job"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let me tell you my wonderful story of how Windows cannot handle today's mobile computing needs.<\/p>\n

All last night I was working on a spreadsheet for work on my laptop, the laptop being plugged into my LAN and accessing the work LAN through a virtual private network. Being the dim-witted fool that I am, I didn't save my work very often... Ah, foreshadowing, what an excellent literary tool... <\/p>\n

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At the end of the night, I was too exhausted to close every document and I really wanted to keep working just as it was set up on the computer, with all documents open, etc. So I put the computer into \"Hibernate\", in which the computer saves the state of your desktop to disk so you can power down, then restore it at a later time. This is different than the \"Standby\" option, in which your computer uses its battery sparingly to keep your session alive. I have no idea why I didn't save the spreadsheet I was working on before hibernating though. (Did you catch it? Did you catch the foreshadowing?)<\/p>\n

I then unplugged the laptop and put it away. This morning, when I got into work, I plugged the laptop into its docking station (to which a larger monitor, external keyboard and mouse are attached) and powered on. The computer told me it was un-hibernating so I went to go get my herbal tea<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When I came back, the screen showed that the computer was up and the workstation was locked. Typically at this point, I press ctrl+alt+del, type in the password and I get my desktop back. However for reasons unknown, my computer refused to respond to any input: keyboard, mouse or yelling. I waited for a couple more minutes before deciding that the computer's un-hibernating abilities could simply not handle being now plugged into a different network (the corporate LAN) and was locked up in a state of misery.<\/p>\n

Thinking I might possibly keep my session, I ejected the laptop from the docking station, opened it and found the computer was booting into Windows as if power had been cycled. Damn, lost the session, but I should be able to recover somehow, right? I was now late for a meeting so I quickly put in the wireless network card and let the computer hook up to the network, got the phone number I needed to dial from sluggish Outlook and joined the call. Netmeeting refused to connect to the chairperson, so I was locked out from that for the entire meeting. Thank you wonderful and reliable wireless connectivity... (sarcasm is another literary device).<\/p>\n

After the meeting was done, I continued to work on the laptop, sending out a couple emails while keeping an eye on the battery icon. When the battery icon indicated half-empty (right now I'm not feeling like a \"half-full-kind of guy\") the computer suddenly went into hibernation saying that I needed to conserve battery life. Argh. It didn't even give me a chance to plug it into the wall, which I admit I should have done some time earlier in the morning.<\/p>\n

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Frustrated, I ejected the wireless network card and plugged the computer back into the docking station and booted it back up. Un-hibernation process begins again. This time the computer is not locked from input, but all things related to network are completely froze. Outlook is a big mass of blank and unresponsive windows. Web browsers refuse to connect out to internet sites. I open up a Windows Command Prompt and type in \"ipconfig\". No response, the command refuses to complete, CTRL-C has no effect. I open up another Windows Command Prompt and type in \"ipconfig \/renew all\". Same thing, no response, a hung command-line. I open up yet a third Windows Command Prompt and type in \"ipconfig \/?\" to see what my options are. Once again, a hung command-line. A fourth Windows Command Prompt and I simply type in \"ping localhost\". Yep, hung command-line. Grrrreat.<\/p>\n

All this time, Outlook tells me that \"Outlook is retrieving data from the Microsoft Exchange Server\" and a progress bar SLOWLY creeps across the window. It's been going now for about 15 minutes and still not complete. Outlook still completely frozen and unusable.<\/p>\n

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While waiting for anything to happen, I open up a text editor to continue working on writing an email. It's only then, as I'm investigating, that I found out how far back I didn't save my work last night in the spreadsheet. Let's just say VERY far back. Of course it MIGHT be possible to recover my Windows state from a hibernation file somewhere, but I can't investigate if that's possible without an internet connection.<\/p>\n

The absurdity of it all finally boils me over. I open up a blank document and begin typing this blog entry. I write this whole blog entry and still my Command Prompts are frozen and still Outlook is hung, still trying to retrieve its data from the Exchange Server. And if I power-cycle the machine now, I'll lose the email I was in the middle of typing that I can no longer access (I'm just assuming Outlook did not save a copy in my Drafts folder because I didn't tell it to).<\/p>\n

I try to bring up the Windows Task Manager, ctrl+alt+del, click the \"Task Manager\" button and I'm still waiting for it. After 10 minutes now...literally... I've tried three times now to bring it up. I cannot bring up the Task Manager in Windows due to the computer not being able to detect when a network connection has been switched.<\/p>\n

What a horrid piece of crap the Windows XP Operating System is. What an utterly miserable failure in terms of meeting my computer needs this morning. But I'm sure Windows Vista will just be frippin' fantastic... You know that video of that guy slapping his computer monitor to the floor (if not, here it is<\/a>)? That's about what I feel like right now.<\/p>\n

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[Edit: I finally cancelled Outlook's attempt to retrieve data from the Exchange Server and saved a draft of my email, then did a clean reboot. That's how, my dear reader, I was able to post finally this entry to my website.]<\/p>\n

[Happy Ending Edit: Although Microsoft Word presented me with around 6 recovered documents from last night, Microsoft Excel presented me with no recovered documents. However, looking through the help files, it said to go to Programs > Microsoft Office Tools > Microsoft Office Application Recovery. I then chose Excel and Excel was able to pull up recovered versions of the document. So despite all the heartache and stubbornness of the OS, I was at least able to recover my work]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let me tell you my wonderful story of how Windows cannot handle today’s mobile computing needs. All last night I was working on a spreadsheet for work on my laptop, the laptop being plugged into my LAN and accessing the work LAN through a virtual private network. Being the dim-witted fool that I am, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}