Of shod, and how much of it Microsoft possesses

Allow me to relate an experience I had with Windows today. A student brought her computer in because her ethernet port was no longer working, and she was wondering if a massive storm we just experienced had perhaps blown it out. A reasonable diagnosis. Jesus and I sat it down and went through all the basic troubleshooting steps, and we determined that yes indeed, the internal ethernet card was fried, and that the best solution would be to get an external ethernet card to plug into the laptop’s handy PC card slot. Jesus got out a card we keep around for just such a purpose and stuck it in. “It’ll work, Windows has drivers for it,” he announced, leaving me to do the grunt work, but I had no such luck; after a frustrating round with the add new hardware wizard, Windows was still clueless about the new device that had appeared. Puzzled, I hopped online to retrieve the missing drivers, but Jesus had already grabbed another card; it too was no-go. He tried five of them, and Windows couldn’t find drivers for a single one.

On the online front, I was having just as little success. One of the cards had drivers only for Windows ME and below, and two only went up to Windows 2000 (which should have worked, but didn’t for some inane reason). The final two had XP drivers, but even after they had been correctly installed, the card still refused to accept them. We did some more research, and made sure we had write access to the area of the registry it was sticking things, disabled NIC power management in the BIOS, and did several more random-sounding troubleshooting ideas we found online in response to the problem.

Eventually, Jesus found a Microsoft knowledge base article that described the exact problem, assuring us that the solution was a quick hotfix away. A quick hotfix, it turns out, that you can’t actually download from Microsoft’s website; you have to use your computer’s built-in “Windows Update” feature!

Allow me to explain the senselessness of this decision. Let’s pretend for a moment that you have a hypothetical computer whose network connectivity is dodgy or nonexistent. Thus, this computer cannot connect to the internet to retrieve patches, updates, or drivers–these must be accessed from another network-capable computer and transferred to the broken one manually. The necessity of using Windows Update breaks this procedure by requiring that a network-incapable computer access the internet. How dumb is that?

Anyway, somewhere in this inanity I discovered that the hotfix we need is contained within Service Pack 2, which her computer has. Soooooooo… if it has SP2, and the fix is in SP2, how come it’s still broken? Never mind, says Jesus, she might have a corrupted SP2 installation. A corrupted installation? How does an update that hooks itself in so deeply get corrupted without affecting anything else? Oh well, I thought, time to go reinstall SP2 on her machine.

For some reason, all our SP2 CDs had flown the coop, so I headed over the Microsoft’s website and searched for it. But oops, as soon ad I tried to grab it, the download page declared that I needed to be using Internet Explorer 5 or greater! How aggravating, and also a little amusing, I thought, that you have to use an insecure web browser to download a security update.

But aha! I had an ace up my sleeve! For just such occasions, I keep around a crusty old copy of IE version 5.something for Mac. I fired it up and waited for it to creak tepidly to life, and then chuckled as Microsoft’s website failed to render correctly on their own (admittedly ancient) web browser. Amusing. But then, when I tried to access the page, it coldly informed me that possessing IE5 isn’t enough–it had to be Windows IE.

And now another little ranty aside. Doesn’t the whole concept of platform- and browser-specific websites pretty much destroy the philosophy and usability of the web? The whole point is that no matter what rickety operating system or gnarly browser you’re using, as long as they and the pages you’re trying to access with them both support the standards the web is built on, you can do what you need. Purposefully designing a web page that sniffs your browser and OS and then completely prevents you from accessing it if you don’t meet its criteria is utterly contrary to the entire purpose of the web. It’s one thing to sniff the browser to warn non-IE users that your website may not render correctly without IE, but it’s quite another thing to use sniffing to deliberately prevent these people from accessing a page regardless of whether or not their browser is capable of doing so. What if the only internet capable computer I have is a Mac or Linux machine? What if I need to access the page from a computer running Windows 2000, which can’t support the latest ActiveX controls used on the page (this actually happened to me on Friday) to determine what needs to be downloaded? Designing with standards eliminates these manufactured problems and simplifies life for everyone, even Windows users–who may decide to use a different browser or version of Windows and want everything to still work. &nbsp/rant

So I couldn’t access the SP2 page from my Mac. But Microsoft itself came to my rescue, because unbeknownst to me (but knownst to Microsoft), there are actually two update sites: Windows Update and Microsoft Update! The difference between the two is beyond me, as is the economy in maintaining two parallel collections of the same data, but hey, if it gets the job done, I’ll take anything at this stage. I headed to Microsoft Update and searched for SP2, but the site had such embarrassingly bad search-narrowing tools that it took me about 10 minutes to shorten the list to 37 items, none of which was exactly what I was looking for. The closest hit was something called Service Pack 2 for IT professionals, which announced in big bold uppercase letters that it was ONLY INTENDED FOR NETWORK INSTALLATION and NOT TO BE INSTALLED ON SINGLE COMPUTERS.

At this point, I was sufficiently infuriated that I settled for using one of the ass-slow office PCs to download SP2, using, yes, Internet Explorer. I logged on, closed the nag screens popped up by some random search bar that had embedded itself in the taskbar of MY account just because someone else didn’t have the sense to click on the “no” button on some pop-up of some dodgy website that was probably viewed in IE. Sigh. Angrily, I clicked on the IE icon twice after it failed to respond for 30 seconds, causing two additional windows to appear. Sigh. I slogged my way to the accursed site that I had been rejected from twice before, and I humbly submitted my operating system and web browser versions in supplication to the sniffer in the web page.

Success! The Windows logo in the corner waved in a digital breeze, a triumphant flag planted in the approval of the Microsoftean overlords. I smiled. I had beaten them. They tried to contain me, but I had beaten them!

Only, I hadn’t. When the page finished loading, I was left staring at an ad for Windows Update, urging me to install it so I could download SP2. The only problem: Windows Update acts only on the computer it’s installed on. If I use Windows Update to download SP2, it gets installed on that machine only. I don’t get a transferrable package, a file I can stick on my flash drive and put on another computer–nada. All I get is the update installed on the machine I download it on.

At this point I snapped. I started swearing, hitting the PC, yelling that Microsoft’s headquarters should be bombed with chemical weapons, and spewing profanities about Bill gates and his company. Jesus sensed that perhaps it was time to step in, and he pushed my rolly chair aside and headed to the Microsoft Update site to download SP2 himself. “That won’t work,” I despondently informed him, “The only thing you’ll find there is for network installation.”
“No, it’ll work, even if it says it won’t,” he replied.
“But…, It specifically says that it won’t install on a local machine,” I said with growing disgust at the possibility of the file having been mislabeled.
“No, it’ll work,” Jesus insisted.
And so it did. SP2 downloaded just fine and we installed it on the target machine with no trouble. Why oh why did it claim so spiritedly that it would absolutely not work, only to have that information proven blatantly false? What would one who was not privy to this insider information do when confronted with such a problem? What could possibly alert you to the fact that “It will under no circumstances work” actually means “It’ll work fine”? In order to navigate this byzantine maze of doublespeak and confusion, you have to already be an expert.