Monday, December 8, 2008
Third Tier
Our customer loyalty software is back up again. The software developers identified it as a problem accessing the WMI service. That's the Vista Windows Management Instrumentation service, not to be confused with the Windows Module Installer, which is a completely different WMI service. The consultants were ready to re-install Windows, and I was too after spending several hours trying to fix the problem. The majority of my troubleshooting time was, get this, trying to rename a Windows folder. I ended up downloading a utility specifically designed to force the issue, and after that, I entered a half dozen command lines I cribbed from a Google search and WMI was restored. So I buy an expensive software package, hire someone to install it, call them when it breaks, and then fix it myself when they give up. It sucks being the guy paying the IT guys.
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Windoze is teh suxxor :-P
ReplyDeleteIt's nice to know that it's back up before Christmas =)
ReplyDeleteWell, as always, the one thing which you can rely on a new version of Windows for is unreliability.
ReplyDeleteYes, although I'll point out it's nearly 2 years old.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure it took at least that long for XP to turn stable. When it came out, XP was at least as laughable as Vista at release. Vista's going to stay troubled for a while more, being that much more complex.
ReplyDeleteI've been using XP since it was released, and while it had some problems, they were never at the same level of severity as the problems that Vista has had.
ReplyDeleteIt did have some of the same types of problems as Vista has, but not nearly as bad. For example, there were compatibility issues with programs designed to run in DOS, but setting up a virtual machine was a relatively simple work around that solved that problem.
There were also complaints that the default interface degraded performance on older machines, but unlike Vista there was an option to switch back to a less demanding interface.
I've actually got the Microsoft certification for Windows XP, and it's always been stable and easy to manage for me. The WMI problem actually exists in XP as well, but before yesterday, I had never heard of it.
ReplyDeleteAs for day to day Vista usage, I've got it on both my laptop and the POS system and it works fine, although the laptop needed a clean install after I got it (but that's another story).