September 18, 2004
Thanks Neighbor
My neighbor got an iPod. He didn’t realize you had to have Windows 2000 or XP. He still had 98. I told him it would be easy to upgrade. Boy was I wrong. I have done lots of XP upgrades. I run it on all my systems but his system was the system from hell.
Problem #1: I put in the XP setup CD and ran it. Everything proceeded just fine. The setup ran for about a half hour and then it rebooted itself and came up with a black boot screen that said “NTLDR is missing”. Huh? The loader is missing? I went in and saw it there. Everything looked fine. After some searching, the solution was to get a Windows 98 bootdisk and run a “sys c:” to re-initialize the system boot files. Took me forever to figure that one out.
Problem #2: The setup now goes in and tries to finish running. After another 20 minutes, a pretty dialog comes up and says that setup failed. Then it gave the details as “MigMainInit:MemDbload would not load C:\Windows\setup\ntsetup.dat (ERROR=3)”. Hmmm. Yeah. Now what. Google turned up a single Microsoft Knowledge Base article that said I had to do way to many steps to try and restore my registry from a system restore point. Um — I never got Windows XP running. I don’t have a restore point. It has now been a day of working on this. Screw it. We are reformatting the hard drive.
Problem #3: Started running the fresh install on the clean hard drive. When it got to the point where it wanted to use the Internet to download any updates, it failed. Got me. Guess I will apply them later. So I get Windows XP running and the network still will not work. It says the cable must not be connected. It is. I take the cable out of this computer and put it in my laptop and I get connectivity. What the heck? Forget it. His DSL modem has a USB network port so I am going to use that. I am getting tired.
Problem #4: I go to demonstrate iTunes working and no sound comes of of the speakers. C’mon! They worked before, right? Yep. Crap. Everything is plugged in correctly. I came to notice that his speakers had an analog and a digital line in. The cord was plugged into the digital. How does the computer know which signal type to send? More Googling. Turns out the driver that ships with XP for this sound card does not expose and option to change the output type because it “auto-senses”. Well, it is sensing wrong. Another 20 MB driver download and the setting shows up. Speakers are working!
Ah…all problems solved and the system is now up. I started working on this for him on Thursday night and we finish on Saturday afternoon. I didn’t spend every minute in between on it but it was always on my mind. Now what doesn’t work? Geez.
At the end, my neighbor looks at me and asks if I learned this all in school. I guess given how crazy these upgrades can be you might expect that only somebody with a college degree specializing in doing upgrades could handle this.
Last month, I upgraded my Apple PowerBook and it took all of 20 minutes and all my settings transferred perfectly. Todd, a frequent commenter here, did a system transfer the other day to a new PowerBook and was up and running in less than 45 minutes also. Why the hell is it so hard for Windows? I mean these experiences are not even in the same freaking ballpark.
Moral of the story is before you offer to help your neighbor with a Windows OS upgrade, be sure that you have plenty of time to spare. You may need it.
One piece of humor while we were waiting on one of the upgrade steps to complete — I fired up my notebook and was reviewing some documents and I noticed that a Wi-Fi signal was available. This doesn’t happen to me that often because we are kinda rural. So who’s network is it? I connect. I am online. Let me see what the gateway IP address is. Got it. Let me browse to it. Oh, it is a Microsoft Wi-Fi base station. You have to type a password. Hmmm. How about “admin”? Works! The name of the other PCs online revealed which neighbor it was. Nobody really likes this guy. So now you can see the IP addresses of the other connected machines. I put those into Windows Explorer and I start seeing shared drives with all kinds of fun stuff. At this point my neighbor’s wife is wondering if this is illegal or if I am some hacker pro. Not really. Normal people do not know how to secure their networks. Why would they? Ah…so at this point I decide that I don’t hate they guy enough to totally mess with him. I really wanted to change his access point to have a WEP password. I opted not to. So I deleted the activity log on the access point to hide my trail and signed off. Geez. Better be nice to your neighbors or else figure out how to secure your network!
