Windows 8.1 Complicates Simple Tasks

I have spent the past 2 days trying to get Windows 8.1 usable for my wife. I can't believe people actually use Windows as it is such a pain. I am trying to hold off on installing another operating system on my wife's computer as that will be burning the Windows bridge once I start. Besides, I said I would give Windows a fair chance. Unfortunately Windows 8.1 is not very forgiving when you make mistakes and there are enough variations that trying to get help from the usual Internet sites is really confusing.

I bought a laptop that came with Windows 8.1 pre-installed. That becomes important when trying to figure out problems. It is not Windows 8 nor is it Windows Server 2012. I don't have it connected to a specific domain, which to be honest should be true for most laptops. There are a lot of trolls on forums that assume it is a work computer and provide less than useful advice.

My latest mistake with Windows 8.1 started with user accounts. When you go to set up an account you have the option of a local account or an online account. I originally set up my wife's account as a local account because I think it is pointless to have an online one. Microsoft disagrees with me and strongly recommends the opposite. Why? because they can reset your password in the event that you forget it. They can also keep tabs on you and everything you do. My wife followed their recommendation and changed her local account to an online one and even provided them with her birth-date. When Microsoft gets hacked, as all unhackable sites do, then someone can use that information to help steal my wife's identity. Naturally I removed the online account and that was the mistake. I was sure to set up another administrator account before I did it, but as she was the administrator, it changed a bunch of the default settings. Instead of having a nice piano image when the computer boots, it had a really ugly yellow-rainbowish image that causes epileptic seizures in cats. That ugly image needed to be changed and that was my problem.

Surely I couldn't be the only person who wanted to change the pre-login screen and so I searched the Internet. I checked a number of Microsoft forum pages but they were useless and so I won't even bother to link them. I found one page that shed some light on the issue as well as a number of related issues with Microsoft's latest operating system. If you bother to go through the postings you can see my frustration. In an effort to save you from a lot of reading the string of posts goes something like this:

• I want to change the pre-login screen image
• Here is how to change the lock-screen image
• That is not what I asked
• Here is a link to instructions from Microsoft
• That just tells me how to change the lock-screen image and is not what I asked
• You are a moron, changing the lock-screen image changes the pre-login screen image
• No I'm not a moron, changing the lock-screen image works only if you have one account for your PC, I have multiple and want to know how to change the pre-login screen image.
• Here is a link to instructions from Microsoft on how to do it in Windows Server 2012.
• I'm not running Windows Server 2012, I am running Windows 8.1 on a PERSONAL computer.

The posts go on for quite some time until finally someone actually gives a very convoluted way to do what the original poster asked. Coincidently that was what I was looking for. Other users having the same issue come up with numerous short cuts.

I read through the solutions and found one that seemed reasonable. In the process, I learned that there are a number of hidden directories (e.g. C:\ProgramData) that you can't get to unless you explicitly type it into the File Explorer. Even then there are a number of difficulties as administrators don't have permission to see who owns certain files. You have to change your administrator user to be the owner of files.

I used to belong to the group of people in the world that believed Microsoft knew how to write software. That is no longer the case as I think they over complicate even the simplest of tasks.

The Christmas I Didn't Want to End

I know it is the end of March where last Christmas was a while ago and next Christmas is even further away. However I was thinking about the best Christmas of my adult life and how I didn't want it to end. When I was young, I didn't want Christmas to end because it meant I had to go back to school and I wanted my break to last as long as possible. Now that I am older, I have accepted that I will need to go back to work and so I am ready when Christmas is over. There have been one or two exceptions and it was one exception I was thinking about today.

It must have been the Christmas of 1999 and I had just finished a theater room in my house. I bought my kids a Nintendo 64 and also got the game Diddy Kong Racing. We would get up every morning during the school break and go skiing. We only skied a couple of hours and would then come home and play video games until dinner. We had 4 controllers and so everyone who wanted, got to play. Our favorite thing was to look for weapons on the tracks and then shoot each other. It was sad when the kids had to go back to school and I had to go back to work.

Now we have the latest and greatest video game consoles and the games are significantly better. It doesn't matter though as my kids are all grown and all but one are out of the house. He will leave this summer and then it will just be me, my wife, and our dog. I've tried teaching our dog to play Diddy Kong Racing but her paws are just too big and awkward to work the joy stick. Some things are best left for young kids on Christmas break.

Running Something Other Than Windows 8

My wife is fed up with trying to run Windows on her new laptop. I spent some time last weekend playing with it and have to agree that Windows 8 is a giant step backwards in the evolution of operating systems. This week I have spent some time looking at alternatives. There are basically 3 choices when it comes to PC operating systems: Windows, MacOS X, and Linux/Unix. I will be working from home next week and will have more time to devote to my wife's computer and will see what I can get running.

There are a number of tutorials on how to get Windows 8 into a usable state. Just use your favorite search engine and use the following key words: Making Windows 8 Usable. With everyone so dissatisfied, I can't believe it is selling any product.

When you look at a Mac computer from Apple, it uses a lot of the same hardware as a normal Windows PC. Therefore you should be able to run the Mac OS on a carefully assembled PC. You can, and to prove it, there is the Hackintosh website to help you get started. Unfortunately this is more of an option if you are building a desktop as opposed to trying to get it to run on an existing laptop. There are some laptops that work better than others but my wife's model is not among them.

The next option is to throw away Windows and run Linux on the laptop. Unfortunately Linux can be much more difficult to use than Windows. Fortunately there is a UI that is easily installed on Ubuntu Linux that makes it look like a Mac and it is called Macbuntu. I will give that a shot and see if my wife likes that.

I should have an inexpensive laptop that my wife can use by the end of next week. I promise that I will give Windows a fair shake as there are a number of people who think it is awesome (I guarantee you that they are the same people that ate paste in kindergarten but are just grown up now). Look for an update next week.

Solving Problems Together

This evening I was at the office until 10pm solving a problem. We had two very important pieces of hardware in our data center behave strangely and that caused some serious problems with our environment. At first we didn't realize the extent of the problems and at 5pm I thought I would be stuck at the office for another hour. It turned out to be a bit longer than that.

Initially I was busy watching two other operations engineers bring systems back online. I could look at my monitoring dashboard which is nothing more than a list of descriptions with a number next to each line of text. I could see services starting back up and my massive data warehouse escaped without any issues. Then I was asked to check out a number of much smaller databases and I realized the extent of the damage to our system.

I didn't really notice time passing as a number of us all worked together solving the technological issues. Some guys hung around even though they could have gone home. Why? Because they would have wanted us to stick around if the roles were reversed. Eventually some really did have to leave because of family commitments and nobody faulted them for it. In the end, there were three of us on the phone solving the last of the issues and we all hung out until we were sure everything was working correctly.

Now I won't claim that my coworkers are perfect and that everything is all roses and sunshine where I work. However it was comforting to have a great team of engineers sticking around to make sure everything got put back to normal. That helped make staying late a lot easier. Thanks guys.

Bad Technology Predictions

Today I was catching up on the news and trying to discover the latest details on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that disappeared this past weekend. It was totally unrelated but I came across an article about 5 Internet predictions that were really off. I would have to say that I didn't agree with many of them at the time they were given. Unfortunately I actually remember a few of them and that makes me feel old. You can click on the link to see the whole story, but here are the predictions in order:

Spam will be gone within two years - Bill Gates, 2004
Websites will never replace newspapers - Newsweek, 1995
The Internet... will explode - Robert Metcalfe, 1995
The Web means the end of Big Brother - Colombia Journalism Review, 1995
No one will buy anything over the Web - Newsweek, 1995

Looking at these predictions now remind me of how difficult it is to make accurate predictions for anything. Even the weather is tough to predict for more than a few hours, let alone days. One of the people that made two of these predictions was Clifford Stoll who wrote "The Cuckoo's Egg" which is one of my favorite books. The book documents how the author was able to track down one of the leading computer hackers at the time. While Cliff was pretty good at tracking down a hacker, he leaves a bit to be desired in the prediction department. I don't think I would do much better though and so I can't fault him. Just remember that even the experts get it wrong every once an a while and so take any predictions with a grain of salt. Especially those about technology.

Another Windows Laptop

My wife has been using one of my old Mac laptops and it is time to get her a new one. We had been looking at another Mac but then I came across a laptop fire sale. I found a name-brand Windows machine with an i7 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a 750 GB Hybrid hard drive for around $500. I couldn't help but pick one up just to see if my wife could make the switch from Mac to Windows. If not, I have been looking for a new laptop to keep on the boat and so it won't go to waste.

I spent a couple of hours over the weekend setting up the new computer and showing my wife how to navigate around Windows. It reminded me of how much I hate Windows, but I tried not to let it show too much. I told my wife to try and avoid using her old computer and just use the new one. Then I boarded a plane on Monday morning and left her alone with her new toy.

I talked to my wife this evening and the first thing she tried to do was get her e-mail set up. The built-in e-mail program with Windows won't support her e-mail service provider. This is in contrast to her Mac which does quite nicely. Strike one for Windows. Unfortunately, e-mail is the majority of how my wife uses a computer. She has set the new one aside and will wait for me to get home to help set up e-mail. In the mean time, she is back to using her Mac.

My wife says that she wants to continue to try and use the new computer but if I was a betting man, I would bet the boat is getting a new computer and my wife will be looking at the MacBook Air in the very near future.