The computing stuff rant thread

[TigaSefi]

My dad’s SSD drive won’t boot for some reason. Really hope that the drive can be salvaged by a simple unplug and plug back in. I haven’t really got the fuckin’ time to do a complete reinstall of my dad’s entire business setup 3 days before we all go on holiday!

[Feanor]

A well-meaning but fairly clueless person re-set mother-dears router to factory defaults.
Now she's off-line, and I can't VNC in to fix things.

There's no way on earth I can talk her through the router config, so I'm going to have to drive over there tomorrow.

[barakta]

Helpful! 

Hope you get motherly tea and caek as your reward (in my case she makes me proper soup as only Mum can make!)

[TheLurker]

M$.  At this point regular readers may skip to the next post. There is, depressingly, nothing new here.

Still here? OK. Read on.

For pity's sake.  How can it be impossible to install one of _your_ products on one of _your_ pitiful operating systems?  Not only that, but _how_ the in the name of all that's holy can it take over two hours to install, correction, _fail_ to install, your application?

A new squeaky clean machine with Win 7 64 bit Enterprise.  Visual Studio 15 U3.  I mean how effing difficult can it be?  I remember installing Win NT from (31) floppy disks and that only took about an hour - for a complete bloody O.S.

I've had to install/reinstall VS15 4 or 5 times on various machines.  Or is it 6? I don't know, you lose count; that and the will to live after a while.  And of the numerous attempts how many do you think worked first time? Go on, Guess.  That's right; exactly 0 (zero, nought, null) times now.  In one case I had to hand the machine back to our tame hardware herder to have it flattened to clean OS.

Shoot me. Now.

[TimC]

Mac OS

So, I've replaced my MacBook Air with a new (but not the latest) MacBook Pro. I've transferred the contents of the MBA to the MBP, no problems (apart from the Bootcamp partition, but that can wait). However, I wanted then to restore the MBA to a bare OS (Sierra) so that it can be sold or passed on to one of the kids, or whatever.

Followed the procedure laid out on the Apple Support website. To the letter. Ended up with a borked MBA, no OS available and unable to boot from an external DVD with a (never used) genuine OSX DVD. Around 10 attempts to get it to do an internet reinstall of OSX (it will only accept Mountain Lion) failed, mainly due to the fact it refused the router WPA2 password. Thought I'd finally got it to start the recovery, went to bed. Came down this morning and no progress. Whatsoever.

Reformatted the SSD (again), another three tries during which it either plain refused to work, referred me to Apple Support, or alleged that there simply was no wifi. Aargh!! But the fourth attempt (possibly number 20 overall) seems to be working and it's now downloading Mountain Lion. If that works, I then have to update to El Capitan before finally getting back to Sierra - and then updating that (and all its apps) to the latest build.

Y'know, sometimes Windows ain't so bad.

[Kim]

Could you plug in a...oh, wait, no, you probably couldn't.

Which just proves that nothing good can come of relying on The Devil's Radio for this sort of thing.

[TimC]

After another format of the SSD, and a lot more swearing at the wifi routine, it suddenly decided it could do it. Using the DVD to kickstart the process, it installed Mountain Lion (which I guess was the installed OSX when I bought it, though the recovery partition was still corrupted). Six hours later, I had a working Mac. It then allowed me a direct update to Sierra (contrary to the online info), which is just completing now. So that's about 36 hours to do a format and reinstall. Nice.

[Kim]

So that's about 36 hours to do a format and reinstall. Nice.

I think that's actually slower than in the dialup days, when I discovered all my original Win95 CDs were in French...

[TimC]

Well, much of that time was getting it in a condition to accept a recovery download in the first place. The actual 2x OS downloads took around 5-6 hours each for ~6gb a time. Yes, my BB's not great!

[Phil W]

Companies that allow you to sign up to their services at the click of a button but force you to ring them up and talk to a human (after suitable annoying time spent in a queue) to cancel when service no longer wanted or required. In what book does this count as good customer service rather than just pissing me off and making me decide not to consider your services in the future?

[pcolbeck]

Cisco WTF have you done with the flash on the latest Nexus switches. Copying a new version of the OS onto them via TFTP or SFTP was running at 48kbs which made a 250Mb OS take 4 hours to copy !
That's mad.  Actually I think its probably something to do with control plane policing rather than the flash itself but still ...

[Afasoas]

M$.  At this point regular readers may skip to the next post. There is, depressingly, nothing new here.

Still here? OK. Read on.

For pity's sake.  How can it be impossible to install one of _your_ products on one of _your_ pitiful operating systems?  Not only that, but _how_ the in the name of all that's holy can it take over two hours to install, correction, _fail_ to install, your application?

A new squeaky clean machine with Win 7 64 bit Enterprise.  Visual Studio 15 U3.  I mean how effing difficult can it be?  I remember installing Win NT from (31) floppy disks and that only took about an hour - for a complete bloody O.S.

I've had to install/reinstall VS15 4 or 5 times on various machines.  Or is it 6? I don't know, you lose count; that and the will to live after a while.  And of the numerous attempts how many do you think worked first time? Go on, Guess.  That's right; exactly 0 (zero, nought, null) times now.  In one case I had to hand the machine back to our tame hardware herder to have it flattened to clean OS.

Shoot me. Now.

You can nobble the installation so it's much faster (not re-downloading the from t'web). It involves copying the content of the media to a share and creating an admin install file.  If interested I can send you some details via PM/email.

[mattc]

Windows (7) Explorer search:

How on EARTH did they make it so random??? I can accept that it won't be as pretty/quick/useful as Google, but it would be nice if it actually found a file, in a folder with 40 files, given a part of the actual file-name to search on.

[TheLurker]

Windows (7) Explorer search:

How on EARTH did they make it so random??? I can accept that it won't be as pretty/quick/useful as Google, but it would be nice if it actually found a file, in a folder with 40 files, given a part of the actual file-name to search on.

I gave up on explorer search within days of getting a Win7 machine.  I generally drop into command line and use ...

 dir /s *file-name-part* > op.txt

Not fast, but reliable.

[Kim]

Dunno if http://locate32.cogit.net/ is any good.  Seems to be a Windows equivalent of 'locate'.

[SoreTween]

dir /s *file-name-part* > op.txt

Not fast, but reliable.

I disagree.  10 minutes into a windows search of a network lcation that I just know is going to turn up sod all I'll kick off a dir and it usually finishes first. 

Windows search can be made marginally less useless by installing the pdf ifilter as that's the most common file type you'd like to search inside.  other file type ifilters may be available but I've never heard of 'em.
Windows search can be made much less useless by using XP in a VM and the pdf ifilter.
DOS search can be made even more productive by using 4dos or grep.

[ian]

Dear Mothership IT Baboons*

If you're going to send me a new mothership mobile how about you set the fucking thing up first so I don't have to spend umpteen hours trying to figure out how to enroll my device via Airwatch (or watching the app crash, it seems). Le sigh, it must be nearly beer o'clock.

*they are actually baboons, we genetically engineered them to work computers, an experiment that evidently wasn't entirely successful.

[ian]

In other news, sometimes I forget Finestre isn't merely a rather charming raven-haired embodiment of all that is evil, a senior level demon and inventor of much of the diabolical we take for granted. As the Demon of Such Things, she's patient, and like a particularly tenacious mountie – if they wore a lot more black and could wither a mortal soul with an idle glance – she always gets always her man. So there I am working away, safe in the knowledge that auto-save has me in a warm, safe, comfortable hug. And then, and it's a rare thing, the spinning wheel of terminal hesitancy. Nothing is quitting. OK, life is too short, let's cut out at the faff and hold in the power button, because everything has been busily autosaving. It'll all be fine when it restarts. Of course.

Except, for some reason that will likely never be disclosed, it hadn't been busily autosaving. It just hadn't bothered but also hadn't bothered to tell me it hadn't been bothering. That's precisely 59 minutes of my life I won't have back. Is that laughter I hear from the underworld. Chortle it up, demons.

Lest not complacency maketh your bed, as someone once said in a cod-olde Englishe manner. And a hearty fucking shitbuckets macuntybollocks.

[ian]

Although, strangely on reopening the file it's now all there. She's either really messing me with or I've stumbled into a temporal distortion field. Again.

[mattc]

Windows (7) Explorer search:

How on EARTH did they make it so random??? I can accept that it won't be as pretty/quick/useful as Google, but it would be nice if it actually found a file, in a folder with 40 files, given a part of the actual file-name to search on.

I gave up on explorer search within days of getting a Win7 machine.  I generally drop into command line and use ...

 dir /s *file-name-part* > op.txt

Not fast, but reliable.

Plenty fast enough for me! Even searching a whole project directory tree at a time (a few hundred docs) it's virtually instant. This has saved me a ton of grief in the last week 


(I did used to know a bit of this sort of thing, but my command prompt usage has been minimal - after using Unix shells in my first IT job, using DOS was always a cringe-worthy experience. So I tend to forget the few useful things it is good for!)



Is there a command to make my predecessors put things in the right folder? (I have a flux-capacitor ready to go.)

[Mr Larrington]

Bloody scammers have been at Lt. Col. Larrington (retd.) Babbage-Engines again and have successfully bricked his desktop machine.  Fortunately it's an antediluvian castoff running XP with nothing very much on it but the cheeky fuckers had the nerve to complain about how slow it was

[Kim]

Those who follow barakta on twitter will be aware that she's in a parental wireless printer circle of hell.

Those who don't follow barakta on twitter should count themselves fortunate.

[barakta]

The colour output (main reason one has a StinkJet rather than LASER printer damnit) is shite, banding tastic!

[Mr Larrington]

Bloody Kindle has decided not to do wi-fi again

[Feanor]

Bloody Kindle has decided not to do wi-fi again

When we first got a Kindle, it couldn't connect to our European WiFi, because my WiFi was on European channel 13.
Older kindles could only do USAsian channels 1-11.

I cant remember if a kindle updeat fixed it, or if I forced the WiFi to channel6 or somesuch.

But there is/was an issue with kindles being too USEsian in their WiFi appetites.
Is it possible that your WiFi has auto-wombled off to channel 13 or somesuch?