Since my tragedy the other day I’ve been pretty busy working on things. My laptop was fine after the reboot, but the desktop was badly broken. It would start up just fine but once it started Explorer (the desktop, start bar, etc) would restart once every 3 seconds or so. I finally got it working, so I thought I would outline my steps here for the sake of anyone else who may have had a similar problem.

1. First I wanted to stop the explorer restarts and so I hit ctrl+alt+delete and went to the task manager. Then I played a game of computer whack-a-mole. If you click on the constantly respawning explorer.exe task and end the process before it kills itself, it’ll stop restarting. Luckily my desktop isn’t too fast so I was able to catch it.
2. At this point I decided that something must have gone wrong with the update, possible because the computer was on an old version of XP (SP1 or earlier) so the best remedy would probably be updating again. Unfortunately Internet Explorer wouldn’t run. I was able to start up Firefox through the task manager by going File > New task (Run...) and navigating to Firefox.exe on my hard drive but though it ran You can’t use Windows Update on Firefox, so I was still out of luck.
3. While in the Run file dialog I noticed that my Samba network shares were mounted, so I could get files onto the desktop that way.
4. I happened to have a copy of the downloadable Service Pack 2 file (270 MB) from Microsoft that’s much better than the network install thing. I honestly don’t remember what hoops I jumped through on their download site to get this or I would point you there. It’s a great thing to have on a CD.
5. I copied that file to the Linux server and then using the Run dialog to open it from the mapped network drive on the desktop.
6. I used task manager to shut down everything non-essential that was running in the background.
7. The service pack installer ran. It came down to the reboot time and I crossed my fingers. When Windows finally restarted everything worked fine again.

There was probably a better way to do this, but this is just the path I took.

Also see these instructions for disabling automatic reboots but leaving automatic updating.

So I’m sitting in bed on the Powerbook doing some editing. My music stops and I look up just in time to hear the Windows-shutting-down noise and see my main desktop turning off. My first thought is something is wrong with the power, which is why the desktop would be acting funny but the PC laptop is just fine. I was going to turn the music off anyway so I keep working. Then beeps and noises start coming from my laptop. The laptop (which has never had problems, even with SP2) looks like it’s shutting down too. I get to my desk in time to see it close the unsaved documents I was working on and start rebooting. It totally ignored the dialogs that were popping up, I couldn’t click or stop anything. Totally helpless. Now I’m in panic mode. Did one of the computers get infected with some new virus and they’re going to keep rebooting? Is some joker on our wifi network messing around? I quickly go to my router status page from my Mac and see just the normal clients are connected. I check the logs on the router and there’s no unusual activity. By this time the desktop PC has rebooted and I decide to log in to see what happens. It boots up normally at first, but then everything starts blinking and explorer.exe seems to be stopping and starting every 3 seconds. The laptop just came back up, so I login to that. A little icon pops up in the taskbar telling me a security update has been installed that required rebooting my computer.

THANK YOU MICROSOFT! I didn’t need those hours of work anyway. I feel so much safer now because I don’t have to worry about evil crackers getting to my data because I can be certain that you will mess it up first. God. There goes my weekend.

I just ctrl+alt+deleted out of the desktop because it was getting painful to watch. The laptop seems fine but I’m so disgusted I don’t even want to touch it. Just earlier this evening I was reading Scoble and thinking MS had some pretty decent stuff in the pipeline I could see myself buying, like the OQO. Not anymore.

The desktop started the login screensaver, but now appears to be totally frozen. I’m just going to turn it and the laptop off. I can see in the morning if maybe this was a virus/worm pretending to be a security update. This weekend will be spent getting valuable data off NTFS partitions and reformatting hard drives. Thinking back I’ve been a user of Microsoft software for about 75% of my life, I grew up with it. Now I’ve grown out of it.

I’m actually kind of sad. Yes it’s 4 AM. Yes I’m going to have to recreate the lost work. Yes I save, and thankfully it looks like I only lost about fifteen hundred words.

Update: Scoble apologizes. He reminds people to save often, personally I hadn’t really left the computer, I was just about 6 feet away. It’s a laptop so I never worry about power outages, it’s highly locked down and hasn’t crashed in at least a year. I wasn’t using Word 2003, even though I own it, most of the work was in open XHTML/PHP documents and a bit in a browser window on my local wiki. I can live with the fact that a hard drive might crash, or lightning may strike, or any number of extraordinary circumstances might cause me to lose data. I can’t reconcile that it was due to a feature of an operating system, a feature I was told to turn on to stay safe, and a feature that bugs you when it isn’t activated. I trusted the computer because of the improvements to stability Microsoft had made in XP and SP2. Trust like that is slow to build and easy to break.

If I was Apple I wouldn’t be worried at all about Windows, I would be worried about the next generation of Linux desktop software. The main reason I’m considering a G5 for my next desktop purchase is that I want a powerful machine that Just Works when I plug stuff in and can still run all the open source tools like Subversion, rysync, PHP, MySQL, etc etc that I rely on. It’s also interesting that all the software I regard these days as truly essential isn’t desktop software, it’s server software. I can survive switching text editors or graphics programs or even operating systems, but if I had to use ASP and SQL Server instead of Perl/PHP/Python and MySQL I’m not sure what I would do. I can function without these things on my desktop, but having to access them remotely (if it’s pretty transparent) prohibits some pretty cool stuff and diminishes my productivity.

Windows and OS X are tools I use to get things done. Linux desktop software (X, KDE, Gnome, etc) is a hobby. If I could focus on getting work done instead of getting my wireless card to work I could consider as a serious and cheaper alternative to a OS X desktop. (No matter what I want one of those new Cinema displays though.)

To preemptively clarify, my comments do not at all apply to Linux in the server space, where it by far the most mature and capable platform out there and I would hardly consider anything else.

I broke down:

Now I’m just walking around with a big goofy grin on my face. First thoughts:

• I cannot tab in forms like I used to
• Enter lets you change the filename instead of drilling down
• The aliasing of the fonts looks funny at first but you get used to it
• It’s faster than my Vaio
• Things are very intuitive (e.g., setting up my bluetooth mouse)
• iSync rocks
• Setting up my phone as a GPRS modem was not intuitive.
• I want something like Putty
• 256MB of memory is not enough
• I’m getting used the quirks pretty quickly
• I keep hitting the trackpad when I’m typing and erasing stuff

It’s not a total switch, I still have Windows XP on a laptop and a desktop that I use daily, and my Gentoo desktop has been running very well. This is just getting my feet wet on a new platform, and greatly expanding my testing enviroment. A big part of my motivation was that a grossly disproportionate part of my audience (about one in six) is on OS X, a platform that I previously had no easy way to test on.

I would love to hear software recommendations and general tips and tricks. One thing I really miss is I used to have shortcut keys that would launch putty SSH sessions to different servers and use key authentication so I didn’t have to type anything, about 5 of them, and not having that is actually slowing me down a lot.

I did it!! I finally got a wireless card working on my Gentoo box. I can finally unplug that unsightly ethernet cord that’s been stringing across my house while I’ve been trying to get this working. The problem was there was a driver I had to download and then put into a directory which I also had to create. I didn’t find much to help me, but this thread put me on the right track. The card is a Harris Semiconductor D-Links DWL-g650 A1 (rev 01). I have been trying to get this (and other things) to work for almost a month now. This is a huge relief, and I can’t believe I’ve been held up this long by something so simple.

For my benefit more than anything. I always forget how to change the keymap on a linux console session:

loadkeys /usr/share/keymaps/i386/dvorak/dvorak.map.gz

This seriously could have saved me an hour or two earlier today.

QWERTY is so painful! Switch to Dvorak. You’ll thank me later.

Update: Matt Brubeck informs me I could just use loadkeys dvorak in most modern distrobutions. Thanks!