A while back I had written about the woes of being on a Microsoft machine and their new licensing models, suggesting instead that the best solution was to change to a Macintosh.
Well, yesterday, Tamara got bitten by the very problems I described in the article. She turned on her machine, and mysteriously it was acting slow; she ran virus checkers, anti-spyware, and registry checkers… all the normal things. It passed “clean.”
We rebooted. And when we did, we got a message that the system couldn’t be booted, to which I tracked down the error message as meaning the registry was gone or corrupted. I tried booting to the prior last working configuration, same message.
So, I used the recovery console off the main XP disc, and to my surprise there were no checkpoints. Furthermore, it claimed that the drive had noncorrectable problems with the file system. There was no way Microsoft was going to be able to recover, much less read this disk.
I moved the disk into my own Windows system, and Microsoft choked big time on it — Explorer froze. All my wife’s files, in whatever state they were in, were inaccessable.
That was they were until I connected with the Macintosh and moved them off the drive with ease!
Putting the disk back in Tamara’s machine, I went to reinstall XP using a total wipe of the hard drive — and in the process proving it wasn’t a physical problem with the equipment, but rather a logical scrambling of the data.
So, what’s the score so far:
- Windows XP blows up
- Windows XP can’t recover
- Apple Macintosh saves the day
- Windows XP needs to be totally reinstalled
And that takes us to the second problem, all that software which was licensed and ‘phoned home’ now thinks this is a new machine, because from the vendor’s standpoint, they don’t know the box went Tango-Unform and isn’t a new piece of equipment — just one of a number of problems with product activation.
It will be many hours before her machine will be up and many days before it will be totally usable.
I can only fathom the catastrophic data loss suffered by someone without the knowledge or resources to deal with a similar situation. Microsoft operating systems are a timebomb waiting to explode, and even well maintained ones will degrade to the point where they can’t be used. There’s no reason a multi-gigahertz computer takes 10 seconds to paint a rectangle menu when you click start or right click.
And, in the wake of anti-virus vendors taking payoffs to not reveal Sony’s rootkit, it’s no wonder that they aren’t protecting against Window’s latest flaw: where your machine can be compromised just by accessing, not necessarily viewing, a picture from a web site.
I suppose there’s no need to point out that Apple and Unix aren’t affected by this. And, at the time of this writing, there’s no fix. The next unfortunate soul of this tale of woe just may be you.
And you’re not using Firefox why?