Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting.... with Vista, what else?

[captainsblog]

Eleanor worked 4 until 9 tonight, her eighth day in a row, and with Em out of the house when she left, I set up the living room for some Serious Guy Fun. Laundry to fold, while watching Oliver Stone's W (which I thought was really well done if you could stand two more hours of looking at and listening to the man) and while running some very important backups on my laptop.

The backup program does not get along with Vista. This we knew. Every freakin' time, it popped a cascade of error messages about one Windows module or another going off its feed, but the burning went on right through all that, so if you weren't multitasking, it was fine.

Or wasn't, as it turned out.

THIS time, after the second of the disks finished burning, the "Windows Explorer has Stopped Working" message continued even after the reboot.  Repeatedly. Even in safe mode, where the black-backgrounded desktop blinked on and off like a beer sign. Why should a dedicated Firefox guy like me care? Because Windows Explorer is not the same as Internet Explorer; it's not the web browser, but rather the central organizer of the entire operating system's file structure. Through a combination of turning the thing off (through Task Manager, which blessedly still worked) and some fastity-clickities on my desktop to get to Firefox, I learned many MANY things about this Vista error. One: it's been a known issue for close to two years. Two: not one of the dozens of message boards, knowledge bases, not-live chats or ANYTHING online had a definitive solution. Three: this operating system is so damned complex and yet brilliant in its multiple levels of redundancies, I could replicate virtually every feature of post-'95 Windows computers (desktop, start menu, document and program file folders) without actually using the central program I've been trained for close to 15 years to use.  So up until about 10 minutes ago, I'd retreated into a sense of accomplished resignation- that this software sucks (which I already knew from previous tilts with the Longhorn beast), but that I would be able to work and write until I once again reached my guru on Monday or, failing that, the manufacturer on Tuesday (Monday being a holiday here, but not for gurus).

And so I went, moments ago, to find a backdoor link to Semagic so I could rant here about it, and found it on my psuedo-desktop created by Task Manager (ask me if you ever need this workaround; it's surprisingly easy), but before clicking it, I also noticed that sitting right above it were the folders where the backup program had encoded the shrunken copies of the backup files prior to burning them. I deleted them, because, hey, that's what I always do when I'm done....

and instantly, the bug went away. Whether it was a virus carried within one of those files, or just a Visty-fit conflict between an XP-designed backup program and the faboo non-XP operating system? I'll never know, partly because it's fixed, and partly because I'm never "crossing the streams" between that application and this computer again.

Comments

[luckycee.livejournal.com]

An incredibly reader-friendly post about a subject with which I have no knowledge whatsoever. Rather like reading Neil Degrasse Tyson explain photons annhilating electrons. Fascinating!