The above words of wisdom were uttered by my youngest daughter Alex the other day as she struggled with an uncooperative Windows Update process that had rendered her system unusable. A repair restart and system restore later and her computer was back up to snuff (Dad to the rescue). She then was able to get her Sims 3 up and running (which was her original goal).
Three or four days ago, I decided that I needed to upgrade my Microsoft Project Professional and Visio Professional to the same version as my Office suite (2007). So, I downloaded the DVD images from my MS Partner portal, mounted them on my system and proceeded to run the setup program for Project. That is when the fun began.
About 75% of the way thru the install, I get a message that “the Windows installer has stopped working.... Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available”. However, the installation of the program continued (?). At about 90% thru the process, I get another message about “The resource 'HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.pip\' does not exist”. This caused the install program to undo everything it had done and put me back at the original version of Project.
Being the geek that I am, I knew that the last error had something to do with a registry key. So I fired up the registry editor and went looking for 'HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.pip\'. Sure enough, there it was. So I tried to open it and I am immediately admonished that my user id does not have the rights to view this registry key! WTF? It’s my computer, I am the only user on it and I am an administrator. WTF?
Did I mention that the above CF also “broke” the rest of Office. Every time I launched any Office progam (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook) it would go into a configuration mode that would take several minutes to complete (every time I clicked on a spreadsheet or document as well). Also, I have a couple of addins in Outlook: One that allows me to sync my calendar to my phone and another that allows me to view my Hotmail email in Outlook. Both of those were broken beyond repair with various and sundry error messages and all around dysfunctionality (there is no such word but there needs to be).
Did I mention that I am a geek? Needless to say I had all sorts of restore points and backups that allowed me to get my system back to where it was before I started this. So other than a colossal waste of my valuable free time, no harm was really done – except that I still had old versions of Project and Visio with no prospect of upgrading them.
To make a long story short, I spent the next couple of days pouring through Google searches, Microsoft knowledge base articles and a myriad of other resources. Through trial and error and perseverance I was finally able to get the upgrades to take without breaking the rest of my system. I will not bore you with the details but suffice it to say that it took some serious tinkering “under the hood” of Windows to get this to happen. Surely not something for the faint of heart. BTW, I am still waiting for Windows to notify me if a solution is available.
Remember Sims 3? Well, we have the Windows version. So Alex says to me: “Sure would be nice if I could play Sims 3 on my Mac Book Pro.” (yes she drank the Apple kool-aid – but that’s for another post). This is doable: We run Bootcamp on the Mac, create a Windows partition and install Windows 7 on it. Then when you boot up the Mac you can boot into either Windows or OSX. This is built into the operating system and, after all, this is a Mac where there are no problems or issues.
Sure enough, about 80% through the process of the Windows 7 install on the Bootcamp partition, the computer freezes up. Nada. Zip. Dead. Hard boot is the only answer. So, here we go, numerous Google searches and, this time, Apple knowledge base articles, apparently this is a behavior that is known to occur when installing Windows 7 on a Bootcamp partition. Nobody knows why – it just is. WTF? But these things don’t happen on Apple machines! WTF?
So, I have come to the conclusion that computers are too hard. And that we should just use them until they stop behaving like they are supposed to and then throw them out and buy new ones. This would serve the dual purpose of always having a state-of-the art system that runs like it was designed to run AND it would keep the computer industry rolling in the dough. Win-win.
Having said all that, Alex, I have to agree with you: My computer IS stupid…
