Dear Microsoft:

I am now three days into restoring my computer after a hard drive failure. The drive failure itself, while aggravating, is just one of those things that happen from time to time. The restoration process, however, is an abysmal FAIL from your end. Allow me to detail the depth of your failure.

I am running a Vista installation on a quad-core AMD processor with 6GB of RAM and dual nVidia 9800GTs in SLI. The rest of my hardware is pretty standard stuff. After partitioning and formatting the new hard drive, I did a clean install of Vista. The 6GB of RAM was overkill since Vista will only support 4GB in 32-bit mode, but the RAM was on sale and came in a six gig pack that was significantly cheaper than two 2GB sticks. Go figure, but that’s not your problem. In the original installation, all six gigs were recognized by the system BIOS, but Vista (as expected) ignored the extra two gigs and all was well with the world. After installing Vista, I found that it was only recognizing 2.5GB of the RAM, which was a puzzlement, but turned out to be caused by a stick being loosened while I was installing the new hard drive. Reseating solved the problem, Vista reported that it had six gigs again and that was the end of it.

Vista installed just as it did originally: very quickly and painlessly. On getting to my desktop I found, as expected, that I needed to install drivers for my hardware, so I broke out my driver CDs and went to work.  Interestingly enough, the Vista DVD came with a more up-to-date audio driver than the one that came with my motherboard, but it was the video driver that worried me since I had tossed the CD that came with the cards. nVidia updates its WHQL drivers several times per year, so the drivers on the CD were outdated by the time I bought the cards, anyway. Windows Update offered me an only slightly out-of-date driver for the cards, but I declined in favor of the latest WHQL-certified package from nVidia.

After installing it, I was immediately met by the blue-screen-of-death on rebooting. Major bummer. "Aha!", I thought, "Perhaps the driver package needs one of the Service Packs." This would be a reasonable conclusion considering the way that you force updates, so off to Microsoft.com I went, only to find that Service Pack 2 requires Service Pack 1 before it could be installed. I had somehow developed the impression that you had abandoned that tactic back in the XP days and that new Service Packs would include the previous Service Packs. Apparently not so. Your recommendation was to NOT download the service pack from the download center, but to use Windows Update to get it. So off to Windows Update I went, only to see that Service Pack 1 was nowhere on the update list. There were about 100 other updates (including the slightly-out-of-date graphics driver), but no SP1. Most puzzling.

"OK," thought I,  "let’s see what the good folks at Redmond have on tap for me". If memory serves, SP1 was released back in early 2008, so I should be seeing updates from before that. I don’t know why since they should be included in SP1, but no. I’m seeing updates from 2008, 2009, 2010, and even from 2011. It would seem to me that installing an earlier update (SP1) over later updates is a quick ticket to system problems, but I will trust that you guys know what you’re doing (if you detect a note of heavy sarcasm, you’re right). So I install the 80 or so updates that you offer up (including the graphics driver), reboot, and find the graphics control center crashes and burns at logon. The driver seems to at least partially work since I was no longer at 640×480 resolution, but there was no way to make changes to resolution, color depth or any of the rest because the control panel wouldn’t run.

I continued by installing a few more updates, reboot, find a few more updates, install them, reboot… Get the picture? I don’t know how many hours I spent dealing with all of that piddly stuff, but it was somewhere around several hours and well over 100 updates before I even glimpsed Service Pack 1 in the update list and the whole time the graphics controls are crashing and burning as soon as I log on. Once SP1 showed up, I felt like I was almost home free.

"Woo-hoo!", say I. "Finally!", as if I had reached the end of a level in some game and won the boss fight. So I install SP1, which takes close to the advertised hour to install. I’m thinking that I should now be able to see SP2 in the update list. Not so. 79 other updates, including Internet Explorer 8. So another couple of hours to get those installed and then a few more minor ones before, finally, SP2 shows up in the list. All this while, the only applications that I have are my antivirus (because I don’t trust anything to be clean, including you); Adobe Flash/Reader because they’re necessary to get my video driver from nVidia and to see the documentation on my hardware; and Google Chrome because IE7 is a POS that I refuse to use (but you made me update it — several times), IE8 is somewhat better, but won’t install until SP1 is in place, and let’s not even talk about IE9. And all the while that this is going on, I can’t even play a decent game of Solitaire or FreeCell while I wait thanks to the graphics issue.

At long last, SP2 shows up on the update list. It only takes about 15-20 minutes to get through the first part of the installation, but otherwise takes pretty close to the advertised hour. After SP2 is installed, guess what? More updates. I am now into my second day of trying to recover from a crashed hard drive and am only now within sight of being able to start reinstalling my applications. One refreshing note, though, is that the driver control panel has stopped crashing. My best guess is that it requires Service Pack 2 before it will work, yet you offer up the driver package almost 200 updates earlier than you offer up the service pack that it apparently requires in order to function. Which Einstein in your development team came up with that bright idea?

After two days of messing with system and driver updates, I’m at the point where I can start restoring the rest of my stuff. I decided that doing a full system restore from my backup drive is probably not the way to go. It’s not I had problems with that configuration (I really didn’t), but restoring functional applications means that I need to fully restore the old registry and all of the assorted junk that goes with that. No. The better course seems to be to manually reinstall applications and I’ll start with my Office installation.

Oops! No can do. My Office 2007 is an upgrade version, which means I need to hunt through all of my junk to find my previous version of Office. My first choice, and the one readily to hand, is my Student-Teacher version of Office 2003. Buzzzzz! Not going to work; it’s not upgradable. What do we have for our loser as a consolation prize? More digging to find the Office XP Professional CD. I finally find it and install it so that I can now run the upgrade to 2007. Office 2007 installs nicely (minus Outlook – long experience showed way too many problems making it play nicely with any non-Exchange email provider), but it seems that there are 20-odd updates to it. Not an unexpected condition. And then there are about 30 more after the first batch. Is this starting to sound familiar?

But what about the system backup that I have? After getting burned by a failed drive on my laptop a few years’ back, I’ve been pretty religious about backing up. To be fair, Vista makes backing up a very painless affair as long as you don’t look too closely at what it asks you to do. Just tell it when you want to backup and where to put the backup files and it will take care of the rest. The only problem is that you don’t tell the user that all he’s getting is an incremental backup. It now appears that I have a year’s worth of backups to restore in order to recover my system.

The old NTBackup was much more informative on what the user gets. Granted, it had a much clunkier user interface. But it asked, pretty much right off the bat, whether I wanted a full, differential or incremental backup. Under your “set it and forget it” mentality, unless you specifically choose a full backup, all you get are incrementals.

Since I have brand spanking new hard drives (going to multiple physical drives seemed a prudent course), I took advantage of them in order to work around your really clunky Restore functionality. I’ll restore everything to an empty partition that’s big enough to hold it all. Now it’s just a matter of sitting back for God-only-knows how many hours while I piece all of those incremental backups back together again. Once that’s done, I’ll move my data files over to where they need to be and then wipe that partition. Not the most elegant way of getting the job done, but it’s about the only workable option you’ve left me. Thanks, Microsoft. You haven’t done much listening to users over the past 30 years, so I doubt you’ll start now. I’m starting to think that Penguins might have a better idea.

[EDIT - 8/16]: As an addendum to my comments about Microsoft’s backup, I have to admit to discovering that a chunk of the problem is mine. When I set up the backup routine, I did not ask it to do a full system backup. Because my major applications and OS are on optical media, it turns out that I had opted to backup only my data directories and some directories of downloaded software. For the vast majority of those applications, I made good backups of the installation files. There are quite a few games where it’s an open question as to whether I have the installation files in the backup set or will need to download them again, but I must admit that Vista’s backup routine did exactly what I told it to do. The question is whether I told it to do the right thing or not. We’ll see.

[EDIT 8/17]: As an addendum to the addendum (maybe I should have just added another post), all is not well with the restore. It turns out that Vista’s native “Backup and Restore” will not backup executable files. So I’ve got everything except the stuff that actually does something. For all but two of my normal applications, it’s not that big of a deal since I have the installation media handy. For most of my games and such, though, it’s going to take weeks to download and reinstall everything. As I commented to my daughter, “when Vista blows, it blows at Category 5”. Thankfully my ISP doesn’t charge by how much bandwidth I use. Penguins are looking awfully good at this point.

This entry was posted on Monday, 15 August 2011 at 21:04 and is filed under tech, Whatever. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.