From the misfortunes of a colleague, I was recently introduced to a new error that beats the good old PC "blue screen of death" hands down.
There has been much complaint about Microsoft's Vista - indeed ever since it appeared in beta. Mostly the arguments have been around lack of compatibility and drivers. I will now add stability/reliability to the list.
The trigger for a fatal crash displaying "catastrophic failure" was plugging in an external USB drive. Ironically this was for the purpose of backup.
There was no ability to restore service from this crash. The only options available were to run diagnostics and review the setup. It wouldn't even boot off a CD! After consulting with IT support it was also determined not to be hardware related.
How can a non-hardware related crash be so bad that the only recovery was to reformat?
I wouldn't have believed this except I saw it.
Information Technology has been around for several decades now, why is the quality of product so low? Why, in the race to market, are such high levels of bugginess acceptable.
Perhaps it's because the technology manufacturers can get away with it. Customers seem to accept it as the norm. But then maybe this is only because there's not really any choice - yes Mac's and Apple have their issues too.
Will there be a tipping point when the people revolt and throw their technology in the bin and revert to pen and paper?
As each year (no, each day) passes we become more tied to our technology in so many ways. So consensual rejection of technology is not likely to happen, but I do wonder that there is no end. Technology is organically evolving and continuing to look more and more like star trek - the ipad first appeared in Deep Space 9, didn't it.
The vision of a remote island (or even the garden shed) with no computer, phones and certainly no ipod, is a delight reserved only for the very few and then very briefly on a holiday - unless you plan of becoming a Tibetan monk.
So in the pursuit of survival and happiness we work with what we have.
Sensibly the said colleague reformatted and installed Windows 7 much to the relief of all those attempting to provide support. Not that windows 7 is by any means perfect, but it does have drivers for most mainstream devices and I'm hoping some of the bad lessons of vista have been learnt and applied to this OS.
What can I say, "change is inevitable - except from a vending machine" Robert C. Gallagher
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