Thursday, April 26, 2007

It has to be intentional

I'm sitting here at the end of the MySQL Conference 2007 waiting for "Orcas" beta 1 to uninstall.  Yes, I know I should have used a VM but that's not the issue.  The issue is that I'm missing a great closing keynote on Yahoo Pipes while I wait for setup to "generate setup script".  Folks, it's been doing that for 30 minutes!

I'm running Vista Ultimate on this Inspiron 6000 but I know these absurdities are not limited to lower end hardware.  I've got a dual-Opteron box at my house and uncompressing zip files is a joke.  Right-clicking a 30 meg zip on my home system (SATA, 2 gig RAM, dual Opteron) often takes at least 10 minutes to tell me that the rest of the uncompress will take another 20.  Enter 7-zip stage left and the same uncompress is done in about 90 seconds.  I've code for almost 20 years and I can tell you that I would have to work very hard to write code this bad.  It has to be intentional!

45 minutes - still generating setup script.

Before I left on this trip I needed to copy the Orcas ISO over to my laptop.  Both machines are on my home network but the ISO is 5.5 gigs so I knew it would take some time.  After showing me a "Calculating time required" dialog for nearly 1 hour the dialog simply vanished.  No file copied, no error, no apology, no smoke afterward.  Copying files on Vista is simply broken, whether it's across a network or local.  On many occasions I've emptied my recycle bin (that had only one item in it) and stared at a "Preparing to recycle" message for 20 minutes.  Hello!  I'm recycling a single 2k file and you have to think about it for 20 minutes.  No wonder we're the butt of the world's joke.

55 minutes - still generating setup script.

Yes, Vista does some good things.  Yes, the things I mention here can and will be fixed.  But for now, my best advice to Vista users is to not copy files.  *grin*

1 hour - finally got the script written.  Now doing the uninstall.

5 comments:

  1. hehe,

    Yes this issues drives me up to wall... I do believe I read that microsoft has released a fix for this but they recommend that you wait till the first service pack is out unless you really have to. Im gonna grin and bare it for now..

    Lee

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  2. Sounds like a issue with your hardware. Or you dont know how to use windows. I never had ANY problem with Vista. People just need to learn not to try to install every peice of crapware they had on XP on their and find a compatible alternative.

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  3. FAO T-Heezy :)


    http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2007/04/17/222983/microsoft-issues-hotfix-for-file-copying-bug-in-vista.htm

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  4. Thanks for the link, Lee

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  5. stared at a "Preparing to recycle" message for 20 minutes. Hello! I'm recycling a single 2k file and you have to think about it for 20 minutes. No wonder we're the butt of the world's joke.

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