Did precisely what I was asked, uninstalled my antivirus, uninstalled itunes, and uninstalled my ati drivers, followed all the instructions, and now my desktop PC is in an infinite loop with Microsoft 7 halfway installed. It restarts, boots to the Windows 7 install screen, sends me an error message that the “install can not be located,” and then reboots. Rinse and repeat.
Heckuva job, guys. I now have a several thousand dollar paperweight.
BTW- That Windows Upgrade Advisor was teh awesome. I like downloading shit that tells me stuff will be fine before installing software that kills my computer.
And not to reignite the Mac v. Windows flame wars, but I am writing this on my MacBook because my windows “upgrade” has left my PC worthless as breasts on men.
sarah in brooklyn
computer problems are the worst. i’m not even gonna make a joke. i just hope it gets fixed soon.
calling all toasters
You’re the Dennis Kozlowski of the intertubes.
meh
buy a mac…I am next time I’m upgrading my hardware…Mac’s aren’t all perfect, but they tend to be easier to use than MS bullshit.
Billy K
Yet somehow, the tech writers can’t type fast enough to declare this “Teh Best Windows Evar!”
Colette
No one could possibly have foreseen this.
Seriously, I’m sorry, and I hope
you can toss it out the windowit gets resolved quickly.chuck
I had posted something but fuck me, I used “edit” on it. Silly me for thinking WordPress wouldn’t completely demolish it.
A recap of what was in the post: always install windows from scratch. Always.
JenJen
Good luck, John! Happened to me once before, years ago, when doing an OS upgrade. No happy ending, either… hope you fare better!!
Lee from NC
@chuck:
Yeah. Upgrades generally are not worth doing. You pretty much always want to install a fresh copy on a nicely formatted/partitioned disk.
In fact, you may end up having to boot from the CD and do just that to clear the problem.
Sorry. :(
Lyle4
That sound you don’t hear is me hugging my Mac.
Osprey
As to reiterate Chuck, installing an OS needs to be done on a clean drive. I don’t give a flying dung beetle what they say-clean slate. And keeping all your documents/media etc. on a separate drive just makes it that much easier to do a format/install of an OS.
If you can’t do that John, set your computer to boot from the Windows CD and try to repair your OS installation.
chuck
The sound you hear is me going between one well-appointed brand new PC and two laptops, a phone, and a Kindle that I got for the price of one mac.
Violet
Oh, no! I agree with the others – always do a clean install. Upgrades just cause more problems. I tend to stick with the OS I’ve got, then move to a new OS with a new computer. I find it’s less hassle.
bago
Boot from cd and tell us what the partitions are.
Just Some Fuckhead
You brought this on yourself by trying to fix what wasn’t broken.
NutellaonToast
Never get outta the boat. Always trust the shorter. NEver install a new OS without a back up.
JenJen
@chuck: I always did like you. :-)
JHF
You get what you pay for, folks. And for all the blather about how cheap your Windows boxes are, in 25 years of using Macs, I have never once, not ever, not even SLIGHTLY, experienced the kind of bullshit our beleaguered host is going through.
Not. One. Time.
Alan
Like all Windows installs, it’s best to reformat the HD and start fresh. Hopefully you haven’t lost any important data.
Ryan S.
What version of Windows are you upgrading from?
zadig
And can we all assume that you have a complete backup from just prior to upgrading? I’m sure that was one of the instructions too.
GReynoldsCT00
Less than two hours to the may-day bleg…
Mnemosyne
@chuck:
You got all of that for less than $599, the price of one Mac Mini? What did you do, buy them from some guys on the street who told you they “fell off a truck”?
Morbo
Hee, “assholes” tag.
I had this happen with a Windows 98 reinstall. For the rest of that machine’s pitiful existence I had to start it up with the control key held down and accept which commands to run line by line. I can’t remember which one caused it to fail to boot, but there was a single one that I had to say no to while leaving the rest as yes. Good times.
El Cruzado
Mac system upgrades are far less troublesome than Windows ones these days and even then I will do a clean install every couple years (then again I often spend months running betas of OS X due to, partly, work reasons. That often leaves a mark).
For a Windows update of this magnitude, it’s probably best to just copy all your files to an external drive, do a wipe and install, and copy them back.
DP
I agree with Lee above, as painful as it is, it is always better to do a fresh install.
Nutella
Did you boot from the CD rather than from the hard disk? That’s probably why it can’t find something.
Should have a better error message, of course.
Nobody’s perfick, though. Did you hear about how Mac Snow Leopard and MobileMe delete user’s data? Everybody needs backups.
asiangrrlMN
Ditto on the install from scratch. At least, that’s what my techie bro tells me every time he installs a new version of Windows for me. Works like a charm.
Maude
Some have advised not to do win7 until the sp1 is done.
Don’t want to get anyone’s dander up, but I would install ubuntu 9.04 until Uncle Bill gets 7 to a better release.
I work with all 3 os and when microsoft errors is bites the big one.
The computer is not worthless.
Most dings can be fixed.
ghost poet
Did you get the digital river download version of 7 or the box? If you got the digital distribution I hope you bought the optional backup dvd.
Zifnab
If men had breasts, they’d never leave the house.
Just say’n.
The Grand Panjandrum
@Zifnab: Does Rush do his show from his house? It would explain a lot.
PaulW
@Zifnab:
Yes they would. To get moisturizing cream for the sore breasts.
Dr. I. F. Stone
For what it’s worth, several weeks ago the tech writers at both the NYT and WSJ recommended that one shouldn’t even attempt to convert an existing configuration from Vista to Windows 7; they both said it was a “nightmare” to get the conversion done right, and effectively argued for keeping Vista around and buying a new PC if you really wanted to adopt Windows 7. I took their advice and got my first Apple and I’m extremely happy with it.
Zifnab
@Maude: As a general rule, you never want to buy a windows product until the first service pack. It’s like buying a car before they’ve installed the front bumper and the steering wheel.
But if you’re coming off of Vista (or, back when XP was released, Windows ME) it’s generally considered the lesser of two evils to just deal with the new edition bugs than the old edition crap. Unless you’re John Cole, in which case Bill Gates hates you and has been planning this shit for months.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@Lee from NC:
Sorry to hear things went wrong, JC. But Lee from NC speaks wise.
I was so pissed that Microsoft charged extra for the 64-bit version of Vista that I’m going to allow my brother to install 7 and use one of the many, many unique keys he gets at the IT office. It’d be a shame to let those unique keys go to waste.
A damn shame.
PaulW
Questions:
1) Did you get the Upgrade installation or a Clean Install?
2) Did you backup all your important files to a portable hard drive? Or at least a flash drive for your documents?
3) Did you try interrupting the Install process by rebooting and hitting F8 or F2 to enter CMOS setup?
<—- glancing for his A+ Software Essentials textbook to see what they say about Installation Troubleshooting for the XP, hopefully it will contain relevant info.
Martin
Any chance there’s a Microsoft Store opening near you? Sounds like they got their shit together in the stores, specifically related to Windows 7. Might be worth the drive.
dmsilev
Oy vey.
Standard computing troubleshooting suggestions:
1) A forlorn hope, but maybe a hard reset (ie power cycling the thing) might help.
2) If you haven’t already done so, make sure that any user data on that drive is backed up. Worst case scenario, find/buy/borrow a USB enclosure for whatever type of drive it is, and hook the thing up to your Mac (which can read, though not write, NTFS formatted drives).
3) If you can restart the install process from scratch, telling it to reformat your drive, that might get you further along. Of course, that’s the ‘I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit’ approach.
4) Sacrifice at least a chicken, but preferably a goat, to the computing gods.
-dms
thomas Levenson
Linux!
I snorted at Stephenson’s “In the Beginning was the Command Line” back in the day, but now….
Violet
@Zifnab:
That’s my general rule of thumb. I let all the hardcore techies sort out the problems, then buy it after the first service pack. No point in being a guinea pig.
4tehlulz
Any chance that you can boot into a Repair Console from CD like in XP?
FIXMBR has saved my ass on more than one occasion when the system failed at boot.
metricpenny
I was reading earlier about my options. I have got to get rid of Vista.
Sorry to hear of your problems John. But you, and the commenters here, have answered my question on whether or not to upgrade.
You all are literally a public service commission.
Alan
@thomas Levenson:
I never had much luck upgrading linux either. Fresh installs seem to always do the trick. It’s usually the path of least resistance for cleaning out a virus on Windows too.
And as said earlier, backups are our friend.
RedKitten
That’s what I do, too. I have no problem updating software, but to upgrade my entire OS? Too much potential for everything going pear-shaped.
Mind you, I have XP on this machine, so I’m really in no rush to change that.
gnomedad
If I ever do this, I’m just putting a in new drive and saving my old one as a backup. Yup, yup, yup.
4tehlulz
@gnomedad: heh, that’s what I’m doing with 7. I’m going to get an SSD then install it on that.
cokane
reinstall ur os
me
Upgrading Windows is fraught with peril. Format and reinstall is probably your only option.
For the record, I’m running Windows 7 RC1 on a very fast machine and it works just fine, but it was a fresh install and probably runs no better then Vista would have.
Mirthless Chopper - Frmrly TheFountainHead
Those Microsoft stores are a trip. I mean, they quite literally could not have copied the Apple Store more unless that had put the Apple logo in as well. Idiots. You can’t just veneer a design aesthetic over a crappy product and call it design.
Anyway, sorry to hear you’re having issues, John.
Time to get an iMac?
Buffalopundit
I jettisoned Microsoft’s Windows OS from my house in 2003 and never looked back, with the exception of one desktop that the kids use to do Webkinz and shit.
Cat
Did you make a backup before you tried to upgrade? I found the tool they added to move your personal settings and applications to another computer really helpfull. If you did that and installed it onto a USB stick or a removable drive, make sure you remove those durring the installation/rebooting phase of the upgrade so that OS doesn’t get confused.
If you are serious in trying to get help on your installation posting a photo of the error message could provide some info.
If you don’t mind reinstalling everything and just want a working windows computer again. Boot from the CD, tell it to repair, and try to get to the recovery console. From there you should be able to rename the c:\Users directory to C:\Users_back and delete your C:\Windows directory. Reboot and boot to the install CD again and tell it to install a fresh copy of windows on your C: drive and dont let it reformat your C:
The Ace Tomato Company
Don’t feel too badly Mr. Cole. After years of frustration with PCs, I bought a Mac and it’s been the single biggest piece of shit I’ve ever owned. Within 2 months, the DVD/CD ROM crashed and now the computer enjoys randomly uninstalling programs and my camera doesn’t work. I will buy another computer in a few months and will be going back to PCs. Way to go Apple.
Maude
@Zifnab: I am totally ignorant about Vista. xp is all the non profit has in the “windows division”. Ubuntu is a life saver and saved one machine that spit out 4 xp installs. I work with no money put into the computers. Ran out of hdds and had to ask them to buy (OMG) new ones. Sometimes I feel like I’m in the dark ages of tech.
I read on a lot of tech sites about win7. For a large company, it isn’t funny in IT Land when the new os does a Fandango.
Spanky
If you need assistance in recovering your machine, let me know. I do this kind of think for a living.
geg6
Sorry I can’t help you out, John. But I am a tech idiot and would only make things worse.
However, in an effort to cheer you up I offer you this colorful and apt description of what has happened to Coultergeist in the Obama era:
No one can write a Coultergeist take-down like the Rude Dude.
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/
Ryan
And that is why you never run the upgrade, but instead a clean full install. There are of course 99 problems with this, but the stability of the resulting system is not one.
cmorenc
@Zifnab:
Guys:
I’ll bet lots of you have had this experience out on the beach in summer: you’re walking along, and come across some overweight guy with breasts lots bigger than those the girl in the bikini you passed two minutes earlier had, the girl who struck you as so “hot” you had to look at her sideways through sunglassed in a covert attempt to avoid appearing to rudely stare at her.
Yeah, some guys do have breasts, but when they do it’s not a feature, it’s a bug.
Maude
I just thought of something. Is anyone surprised that John is having trouble with this? I mean, how could ANYONE lose something the size of Tunch?
Janefinch
Never upgrade unless you have to…and as everyone else has said, a clean install may fix your problems.
As for all the Mac users swearing how perfectly their machines run, why does Apple need customer care centers in several locations then? The O/S upgrades aren’t necessarily any better than Windows, and there’s plenty of work for Apple Care agents. And let’s not even start on the iPhone….
Ajay
I installed to Win7 few weeks ago and it was flawless. I was very impressed. I didnt upgrade from an existing win installation so I cant comment on the issues but this OS is very light compared to previous releases.
thomas Levenson
@Alan: “And as said earlier, backups are our friend.”
amen and amen, brother, fellow communicant in the church of the redundant hard drive.
strawmanmunny
John, you want to do a clean install, here is a step by step guide to do it with an upgrade disk. I can’t say it works as I haven’t got my upgrade disk yet, but you can take a look.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1649-clean-install-windows-7-a.html?ltr=C
Phoenix Woman
Poor John! I feel for you, chérie.
By the way, has anyone ever been able to get Windows Sleazy Transfer (complete with the $60 Oh So Speshul Cable) to work? I never have. I ended up using my 8GB USB drive and doing sneaker transfer; it took less time.
low-tech cyclist
I work for a government agency that still uses Windows XP as the OS on its thousands of PCs. And my wife and I have XP on our home desktops and laptops. It’s stable, it’s reliable, and in a reasonable world, XP would be supported forever with only minor tweaks.
It was a pretty big tell when all the PC manufacturers had to create all those dual-core machines just to be able to run Vista. Something that big and cumbersome that didn’t seem to do any whizbang stuff that XP didn’t, was clearly something to be avoided.
Violet
OT – Important Bitsy update! She just pulled ahead of her nearest known competitor, Rufus!
Little Bitsy: 4381
Rufus: 4375
Go Bitsy!
Zifnab
@Maude: Stick with XP. It’s a rock hard OS after Service Pack 3. There is absolutely no incentive to upgrade to Vista that I can think of. Once the bugs start coming out of Win7, it’s worth talking about upgrading, but don’t go out of your way for it.
I stuck with Windows 98 straight through 2005 and didn’t feel like I missed anything.
Mirthless Chopper - Frmrly TheFountainHead
@Janefinch: I have absolutely no numbers on this and am pulling it entirely out of my ass, but my experience and observation has been that the vast majority of the people who come in to Apple Customer Service are having hardware problems. You know any computers by any manufacturer that don’t get hardware problems? And at least I don’t have to call India to get technical support from Apple.
valdivia
@Violet:
go Bitsy!
So sorry John about your lost computer.
Gus
Couldn’t have been any more predictable. I have three Macs, and I’ve only upgraded the OS on one of them. One’s running 10.3, one 10.4 and one 10.5. I will upgrade the one running 10.3 so I can use it with my iPod. I will wait on the others until a compelling reason comes up (if one comes up) to upgrade.
Gus
Couldn’t have been any more predictable. I have three Macs, and I’ve only upgraded the OS on one of them. One’s running 10.3, one 10.4 and one 10.5. I will upgrade the one running 10.3 so I can use it with my iPod. I will wait on the others until a compelling reason comes up (if one comes up) to upgrade.
Anoniminous
@Alan:
And always mount a scratch monkey.
Anyway … Google is your friend:
Fix Endless Reboot of Failed Windows 7 Upgrade from Windows Vista SP2/SP1
http://www.blogsdna.com/4348/fix-endless-reboot-of-failed-windows-7-upgrade-from-windows-vista-sp2sp1.htm
Have no idea if this will help …
valdivia
idiot question of the day: so I have a fairly new dell laptop that came pre installed with Vista and I have had zero problems (knock on wood). Why would I switch to windows 7? Do I have to?
bago
Man, this thread is just loaded with so much… Speculation.
The only helpful thing I’ve seen so far is the reccomendation that you pop out the disk, as you might be booting from that. This is of course dependent on what boot order your BIOS is set to.
The person who has been “running a mac for 25 years without a problem” is lying. You DO realize that macs didn’t even have protected memory until OSX, right? Protected memory, a little feature that came out with the 286?
dmsilev
@Janefinch: The only times I’ve ever dealt with AppleCare (either in the store or on the phone) is for hardware issues.
I’ve done in-place upgrades of OSX starting with 10.1->10.2, and pretty much all of them since, and have never ever had a problem. I’ve also experienced the utterly painless process of moving from an old machine to a new one (join machines together with FireWire cable, hit ‘go’, come back in an hour to find all data, applications, random crap on desktop, etc. on the new one). Moving between Windows machines, absent third-party tools, is a royal PITA.
Apple does a fair number of annoying things, but the upgrade/migration experience in OSX is head and shoulders above what Microsoft provides.
-dms
Phoenix Woman
@low-tech cyclist:
Yup and yup. I bought my laptop in late 2006 because it was the last of the XP models on the shelves at the time; interestingly enough, you’d have thought that the store in question (Best Buy — yeah, I can hear the purists gagging from here) would have wanted to put blowout prices on them to get ’em off the shelves, but they were selling at close to full retail.
My favorite thing is that the laptop was touted as “Vista Capable”. Heh — even when it was new it would crash at least once a week, and that was with XP SP2b; God only knows how horribly Vista would have done on it.
(Speaking of Vista: Don’t run it on anything less than 3GB RAM and a 2.0gHz processor.)
Brick Oven Bill
One thing that I do not understand is why men have nipples. I do not believe that male dogs have nipples.
JeremyH
Dude. Didn’t anyone tell you not to upgrade the day a new OS is released? Always wait at least 6 months.
jeffreyw
@valdivia: 1) no good reason 2) nope
Anoniminous
@valdivia:
General Rule: If it ain’t broke don’t try to fix it.
Jason B at Work
Listen, John Cole and all you WATBs!
I hate MS as much as the next guy but there simply is no good option for in-place upgrade, whether you’re talking about Windows, OSX or Linux (yes, Linux is kind of a walking in-place upgrade, but you gotta be handy with the terminal to do it). When you try to do an in-place upgrade, you are asking for a lot, particularly out of a system which relies on a registry. Personally, even if in-place worked for everyone and the world was all smiles all the time, I would still always do a clean install. It’s just better that way. I mean, you’re upgrading your system, right, so that means you actually want BETTEER performance than before. So don’t half-ass it with some pussified upgrade operation. Do a clean install instead, and get the most out of your new OS.
bago
@Zifnab: You sir are crazy. I worked on both 98 and 2k. If you didn’t notice a difference, well, uhm… Yeah.
Davebo
Google Ultimate Boot Disk for Windows.
Download it and burn bootable CD.
Boot the PC from the CD.
Backup all data you want to keep.
Perform clean install of Windows 7 on freshly formatted partition.
NEVER UPGRADE AN OS AGAIN.
That is all.
dmsilev
@valdivia: If what you have is working, best not to tempt the fates. Windows 7 is basically Vista, with a few additional bells and whistles.
-dms
Lee from NC
@valdivia:
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Laura W
@Violet: I knew I could count on you to hold down refresh post while I showered and put on PJs! Blew off all errands and will order in the crappiest Domino’s on the planet. Who can drive and shop and deal with people when something this exciting is occurring?
Punchy
Appul suxxor too
Phoenix Woman
@bago:
Actually, I know a guy who has a MacBook 13-incher because that’s what the folks at the nursing home where he’s living recommended he purchase when he sent his Windows laptop to computer Valhalla via a cup of coffee.
He’s never needed to futz with it once, which is a good thing because his computer skills, which were never the best, are (thanks to the stroke that put him in the nursing home) pretty much now limited to hitting the power button and answering e-mail. Simple web surfing is beyond the poor guy.
trollhattan
In the darkest of hours, when one’s PC is melting into a little toxic puddle, it’s good to have Alan Grayson bring a smile as he kicks some congressional booty.
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/10/22/grayson-grills-broun-constitution/
Florida will never make good on 2000, but sending Rep. Grayson to congress don’t hoit.
SFPhil
Many, many sympathies. Not knowing any better, I once bought a cheap refurbished PC from Tiger Direct. Endless crashes, hours on the phone with all kinds of technicians, ended up trashing the thing. Horrible experience.
A few months ago I bought a new HP PC for home use with Vista pre-installed. I immediately got rid of Norton and added what I think is a good anti-virus program (Vipre), then installed Firefox and a few minor programs. Everything works fine together, no problems, Microsoft updates itself automatically, and NO WAY IN HELL would I install 7, even if they gave it away. I’m sure I’d be in exactly the same situation you’re in right now. Why tamper with it, if everything’s working fine?
The only way I’ll ever get 7 is when I decide to upgrade to a fancier PC years from now with more graphic bells and whistles, and then I’ll buy one with 7 already installed.
bago
@valdivia: The UI thread got a bump in priority in the CPU scheduler, so the UI is snappier. UAC and superfetch are tweaked to fit in more with consumer expectations. The shell is pretty nice, and aero peek is great.
From an API perspective, it’s not too much different unless you’re writing driver code, or playing with the jump lists.
geg6
Oh, and another thing that might brighten up your day, John. Glennzilla h/ts you today:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html
Maybe there are some mentions of Bitsy in that thread and we can get some new voters.
Elizabelle
A public service announcement, John, although sorry this happened to you.
Microsoft should have warned its existing clients about this possibility. I remember all the whining from friends about Vista, and this compounds the fail from that.
Typing from a MacBook. Microsoft has probably made its own bed with this upgrade.
Apple 4Q profits up 47% announced earlier this week. Stay tuned!
From NYTimes today, and someone might have posted this earlier:
Pogue answers reader questions on Windows 7
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/pogue-answers-reader-questions-on-windows-7/?hp
Pogue’s review, posted last night
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/technology/personaltech/22pogue.html?em
[254 reader comments; some of them might be useful]
valdivia
thanks y’all. sticking with what I have.
only thing is I am going to install grease monkey and cleek pie filter in chrome today. I am missing all the pie in the threads where BOB appears.
Easa Dara
In ireland, the expression is “as useless as t1ts on a bull”
General Winfield Stuck
I missed the cut=off date to get a free W7 upgrade by two weeks. Now I am happy about that.
James Hare
@JohnCole
Davebo has about the right idea. I use a disk called HiRen’s boot disk — get something with a bootable windows image on it and use that to move your files. Then partition and install from scratch. I haven’t actually done a Windows 7 upgrade, and wouldn’t trust it to begin with.
I think “upgrade” functionality in Windows is a way of encouraging users to purchase new PCs. If you’re going to install Windows, do a clean install. You’ll pretty much always be happier.
Jason B at Work
@dmsilev: Well, sure it’s better for in-place upgrading, considering that they spec it out to an incredibly small list of hardware. I mean, utterly minuscule compared to what MS has to support. And even then it’s hard to always get it right, as I remember there were some Tiger to Leopard upgrade issues right at launchtime.
General Winfield Stuck
Absolutely gawdamn right.
bago
@Phoenix Woman: True. If you never take your car out of the garage it’s kind of hard for it to break down.
bvac
Who the hell upgrades? Wipe and do a fresh install. Always.
pto892
Not a solution for JC, but Linux is the way to go on PC hardware. At least it works for me and has never left me in the state of being unable to access the computer. My latest upgrade was last week when I ran “emerge -ua world” on both my laptop and desktop. Even when things go south (and they can do so in Linux Land) I can always get into the machine and fix it without reformatting and reinstalling the OS. The only time I’ve ever lost data under Linux has been because of hardware failure….not because of crappy install/upgrade routines.
Barry
Billy K
“Yet somehow, the tech writers can’t type fast enough to declare this “Teh Best Windows Evar!” ”
Somebody did a review where they compared back-to-back quotes from various magazines and reviewers, praising Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
Amazingly, both were ‘the best Windows ever!’.
In fact, I believe that that phrase was repeated, word-for-word, several times in different reviews.
If I were suspicious, I’d believe that the reviewers just reprinted a MS press release.
But that’d make me UnAmerican.
Bret
Screw Mac AND Windows. I run OS/2 Warp.
Tom Betz
@Davebo:
The most complete and to the point solution to John’s problem offered all day.
@Alan:
Actually, it’s best to install a second hard drive and install the new version on a fresh partition on the new drive, leaving the original working OS intact on its own original drive. That way, if you find you have difficult-to-solve driver issues with the new OS< you can always boot to the original OS and download what you need to resolve them.
That’s what I did with my new AMD Phenom system last weekend. Having that working Vista Premium installation waiting there in case I needed it made me feel so much more secure…
Ruckus
Someone beat me to the concept but what the hell.
Breasts on men are not useless. Tits on a bore hog on the other hand…
bago
@Tom Betz: Or just shrink your current partition and make a new one from the free space.
steve davis
NEVER upgrade with the first version of new software or operating systems. It will take them six months to figure out all of the kinks that they didn’t know about in the beta. Basically, a new release IS the beta.
Tsulagi
Yep, surprise factor=zero. No one could ever have predicted and all that.
They resurrected Microsoft BOB?
The RSSF warriors no doubt would differ.
Phoenix Woman
@bago:
Oh, come on. It’s not like he’s never online — he goes online via the Yahoo website (he has a Yahoo e-mail account), which is set to automatically appear at the end of the (20 second) bootup routine. (That’s right: His three-year-old MacBook boots up faster than my brand-new Vista, and probably yours too, unless you’re not running any antivirus software — which is not a wise move for someone with a Windows box.)
Hey, I like and use Windows boxes all the time and the Mac interface gives me fits at times (I keep wanting to ‘right click’ and can’t), but I can see how his Mac would serve his online-access needs quite nicely without crashing or putting out a welcome mat for viruses.
el_gallo
Two things:
First, as someone who produced transexual porn for a few years, breasts on a man can be quite useful.
Second, Ubuntu work great, upgrades in place quite nicely, and it totally free. Download it on your Mac, burn it to CD, boot and give it a try — all without messing with your Windows install. http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download
If you’ve got an Intel Macbook, you can download VirtualBox from Sun, then install Ubuntu in that and try it there, should you be so inclined.
The Pale Scot
if you come to the point where the box has become a piece of industrial art, you could always turn it into a Hackintosh, the technology is getting pretty good, there are GUIs for the command lines now so you don’t need to be a codiholic to manage it. Haven’t done it myself, but I know those who have. All those millions of PC’s that are tossed out could be salvaged with an install of Tiger 10.4, and stay functional for years, it would drive intel and Bill crazy.
Sentient Puddle
This is actually the only instance of an in-place upgrade of Windows 7 screwing up. Everywhere else I’ve heard people cautiously say that in-place works well (though the rest of the day may totally shatter that), and considering how much 7 is based on Vista, seems to me like in-place wouldn’t be too problematic. So…not entirely sure the 7 pile-on is totally warranted here.
I don’t know, unless I can get Vista to recognize my external drive to back up everything, I’m still going to try in-place tonight when I get home. Or maybe I’ll at least throw everything important on a partition.
Peter J
Snow Leopard seems to be deleting Mac users’ home directories.
But I guess that’s a feature?
The Ace Tomato Company
Why the hell is almost every comment I make sent to moderation?! This is getting very frustrating. I am not BOB!
The Pale Scot
“unless I can get Vista to recognize my external drive”
that’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard.
me
Tom Morello is with Nine Inch Nails? WTF, MSNBC?
Comrade Darkness
Dude, why didn’t you do the upgrade to win 7 on the mac FIRST. Then you could see if you liked it, and since it’d be running in parallels, you wouldn’t have a paperweight, you could, in fact, at this moment have OSX, Vista, and broken win 7. And then in the Mac, you could just send broken win 7 to the trash. Done and done.
chuck
@Peter J:
They just weren’t worthy.
Kirk Spencer
@JHF:
Good for you. Me, I’ve had problems like this and similar, though I’ve only been using macs for about 22 years. (The first couple of years of Mac SEs sucked in my experience.) I had massive problems with an ‘upgrade’ of two different powerbooks over the past few year just as a recent example.
I do not care what the computer is, I’m going with the majority. Save the important files and such, then make a clean install. Most of the time this is unnecessary labor. It only takes once, however, to make you a believer.
Comrade Darkness
@Peter J: Only if you login on a guest account. Which isn’t common, really. But that said, I’m with the guy you are ragging on, but that’s because I’m always an entire version behind at worst, or at least wait 6 months to upgrade at best.
Doesn’t matter what system/device/network you are on, if you make yourself an early adopter, be prepared to deal with the consequences.
I avoid them. Always. Life is good.
L. Ron Obama
@Phoenix Woman:
Undoubtedly you are aware that a two-fingered tap on a recent trackpad (under 3-4 years old) is equivalent to a right click, as is holding the Control key and clicking the left button.
Llelldorin
@bago:
Not necessarily. Protected memory is crucial if you’re developing software, or if you run buggy software. In principle, if you only run relatively bug-free software, the lack of protected memory might never bite you. If “no problems in 25 years” guy was fairly timid in his software choices, he might well not be lying.
That does suppose he upgraded from 68K to PowerPC relatively late in the game, because the PowerPC version of System 7.5.x was itself buggy software.
(That’s not meant as an argument against protected memory! Protected memory was eliminated in the desperate quest to squeeze the original Lisa system down far enough to run on 128K of RAM in 1984, and the system suffered from the loss until it was finally reintroduced with Mac OS X.)
Grumpy Code Monkey
@bago:
Fixd.
valdivia
totally OT but this is too too funny. wonder what will happen when the Palinites buy the wrong book? Heads exploding that is what.
bago
@Comrade Darkness: Of course you realize that a VM wouldn’t have the same BIOS settings and hardware combination, which would make the “test” invalid, correct?
Sentient Puddle
@The Pale Scot:
No kiddin’. I think if the install bricks my system, it still might be considered an upgrade.
bago
@Grumpy Code Monkey: I was born when the 8088 came out.
/megeganmccain
handy
@valdivia:
That is awesome. Oh, and on Cole’s bad Windows install, it’s like Confucius said, “There are two types of people in this world: he who lost data, and he who will lose data.”
Loyd Case
Try taking the DVD, washing it with warm soap and water, then drying it. After that, try installing Win7 again.
Grumpy Code Monkey
BTW, since we have a nice little flame war going here…they all suck. MacOS (Classic and X), Windows, Linux, Unix (
AchesAIX,UP-CHUXHP-UX,SlowarisSolaris), BeOS, VMS, TOPS, MVS, all of them suck. All operating systems and user environments suffer from at least one critical, rage-inducing flaw, and all suck about equally. Except MPX (or whatever the hell it was called; ran on Encore machines) — that particular system sucked worse than all the others combined. I had never before seen a system where the fucking text editor (a lobotomized version of vi) could halt the machine.john b
getting external drives to work between mac and windows (both ways) is a pain in the ass. i’ve had trouble doing both.
General Winfield Stuck
I haven’t had any real functionality problems with Vista, it’s mostly just annoyingly and unnecessary steps to make things work, especially dealing with photo’s which I do a lot of. The big snafu is that it won’t accept the driver for my 10 year old but 400 dollar HP printer. And when I search Vista for a pre installed driver, it gives me a different printer driver that doesn’t work. I could probably find a way around this with some fix online, but haven’t garnered the interest to spend several hours to figure it out. But I have had much less malware than XP and less maintenance, especially with the registry, so it’s Vista or bust.
L. Ron Obama
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
Plan 9 also sucks, but all its sucking is done in userspace.
EEH
@SFPhil: I had to disable the automatic updates on my Dell with 64-bit Vista because everytime it updated, it crashed the system and it was harder than heck to get it back up although I always did eventually.
Does anyone out there know of a way to keep this from happening or should I just forgo the updates the way I have been for several months now.
Tonal Crow
This is why it’s best not to install software until many other users have wrung out the bugs. That said, you can take a tiny bit of comfort in having performed a public service.
If you have backed up your data, you could try a “new install” rather than an “upgrade install”. You’ll lose all your settings, but you’ll probably get the system working again.
catclub
Pardon my ignorance, but does an upgrade (if it worked)
allow you to not need to re-install all of your installed programs?
A clean install sounds so easy if you do not have a lot
of other installed software. Is everyone who says “make a clean
install” ignoring all the OTHER software that needs re-installation,
or is that just assumed?
Corner Stone
Hanging at 62%? Do you mean this known issue?
MSKB Hanging at 62
ETA – it’s for hanging, not endless rebooting so maybe not.
Ash
@L. Ron Obama: I am admittedly a complete snob and get all high and mighty when people can’t figure out how to “right click” or “print screen.” Teh Googlez!
Comrade Darkness
@bago: The lack of protected memory had an interesting follow-on effect. If you installed crappy software, it would behave badly, you would delete it and life would be good again. Protected memory is a non issue if your software is well-written and having your new software immediately tell you it is crap, not a bad thing.
I remember trying to run an IP stack on win 3.1. Oh my god. Nothing, but nothing can top that experience for a supposedly end user operating system. What a joke. And the machine wouldn’t do more than 16 colors. 16 total colors. Not like 16 bits of color. No, 16 fucking colors. This was at the same time I was doing video editing and photoshop on my Mac IIx.
Housofunk
Maybe we’re losing sight of the fact, with all the admonishments and advice being offered to JC, that you shouldn’t need four hard drives, twelve partitions, and eight backups just to install an OS. It’s a sad state when we are resorting to not trust an initial release because of our own paranoia or even because it actually really does suck that much.
The vast majority of people don’t know anything about registries and clean installs and Linux, nor do they care, nor should they. It shouldn’t be too much to ask that the OS work on a fundamental level.
The bug in snow leopard deleting users’ data is limited to only users who have guest accounts turned on when they upgraded. Most mac users have no idea what guest accounts are much less have them turned on. So the subset of users who are having this issue is miniscule compared to the amount of people in JC’s position today by upgrading to 7. Not to say that the bug sucks and shouldn’t be fixed, but proper perspective is needed.
freelancer
@me:
What did you expect? Pitchfork?
and plus, What’s with the butthurt from REM? Have you heard any reports of Gitmo using REM?! Lars Ulrich was on Maddow a few months back and he just shook his head when she mentioned how they’d play Metallica to prisoners, saying something akin to “There’s much harder Scandinavian Death Metal Bands out there than us. C’mon.”
john b
nah, you just need to spend a couple thousand dollars on the computer to begin with, that’s all.
Anoniminous
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
The IBM System/360, introduced in 1964, had memory protection.
The Burroughs B5000 stack architecture had an implicit memory protection scheme. This system came out in 1961.
So, take your choice ;-)
b-psycho
Early adopters always get fucked. No sympathy.
Comrade Darkness
@bago: Huh? I have a macbook right here running three flavors of windows (for browser testing) as well as mac os x. I can fire them all up simultaneously in fact, each in their own windows.
BIOS? Um, we’re talking about installing on a mac… Speaking of BIOS, the story about MS not changing over to EFI is an interesting one. Running scared and clinging to crappy old standards as a means of holding market share maybe?
added: I meant “testing” as in, whether cole liked win 7 enough to risk his main machine on it. A personal test, not a h/w test.
blahblahblah
I told you, I’ve got a PDP-11/77a right here! You can borrow it. You just need a machine room, three phase electrics, and a 5 ton Liebert.
Tom Betz
@EEH
The first thing I do to a new Windows machine is disable the automatic updates. This is especially a problem post-XP, because the automatic updates also have a nasty habit of automatically rebooting your PC, even if you are in the middle of doing something, if you happen to miss the blinky warning window.
All too often, if you have something (or several things) running when this happens, it will damage your OS installation, often requiring a re-install.
But then you have to remember to close all your applications and run the updates manually the second Wednesday of every month, at least, to keep up-to-date with the trojan writers.
Danton
Probably a good idea to start making dinner. We’re having grilled souvlaki with Syrian flatbread and tzaziki sauce, a cucumber-artichoke heart-feta salad, and asparagus glazed with balsamic vinegar. Oranges and figs soaked in port and cinnamon for desert.
The dog is getting her Thursday Night Special (a can of high- quality wet food). The cat will have a bit of salmon.
Janefinch
@dmsilev: I can say the same thing about Windows (save for ME, and that was a short-lived nightmare). Do I have to go to forums to find out how to deal with all the annoying Windows features? Of course. Do I have to figure out work-arounds until the O/S is what I want? You bet. Minor problems in the life of a computer, IMO.
Anecdotally (and that is the forte of Mac users), I have a seven year old Dell that would still be working fine if the memory could be upgraded any further….processing speed is still great..FOR XP. I wouldn’t dare put Vista or anything else on it. I now have a top of the line 64-bit HP and Vista works just fine…stable as can be. Why in heavens name would I take a chance of upgrading to an O/S just because it’s new? MS will support Vista for the next couple of years…by then I’ll need a new computer.
And at the end of the day, we may argue to the death about Mac vs. PC, but we better all agree to vote for Little Bitsy!!
jeffreyw
@General Winfield Stuck: good luck on finding a driver, I spent a week lookin and found a driver HP provided for Vista that did not work
General Winfield Stuck
@jeffreyw:
i fear the same fate.
geg6
takes a good look around the thread…
When did Balloon Juice’s official language become Chinese? I don’t speak Chinese. No fair.
The Moar You Know
@Grumpy Code Monkey: Ahhh, BeOS. The most kickass OS ever built…that couldn’t do anything.
Comrade Darkness
@Tom Betz: Um, disable automatic updates? Yikes. I think TTL on an unpatched windows machine is down to under an hour, infection-wise.
Keep everything backed up to a network attached drive, keep one old computer running just in case of main machine failure. That’s how we work it here at Chez Darkness, and it works pretty well.
Oh, and never upgrade until the new version is out for 6 months. Did I mention that?
valdivia
@geg6:
Same here. This is why I tried to be OT with the Palin thing.
JGabriel
Zifnab:
Clearly, you’ve never been to a mall. There is ample proof on display in any American shopping mall that men with breasts do leave the house. Unfortunately.
.
hypusine
@pto892
Seconded. For the non-linux-head, using PC hardware, I strongly recommend Ubuntu. Been a linux man for about a decade and Ubuntu has, hands-down, the most user-friendly automated install I’ve seen.
Might be a solution for any system, JC’s or otherwise. Save lots of headaches by confirming hardware support. And, of course, you can just take it for a CD-based test drive without making any changes aside from booting from the CD you download and burn.
Not that I’m suggesting anyone try Ubuntu linux or anything.
blahblahblah
And didn’t you know, Slate has announced that Windows 7 is the best Operating System … ever!
http://www.slate.com/id/2233294/
Lee from NC
@catclub:
Kind of assumed. It pretty much takes me a full day to do a clean reinstall on my home PC just due to all the stuff that has to be reinstalled.
Just for Internet you have to get Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Realplayer, Quicktime, and a few other things I’m probably not thinking of.
Not to mention reinstalling Microsoft Office. And all the Windows updates have to be downloaded and reinstalled. And then all your other programs as well. So yeah, major undertaking but worth it in the end since it’s much less aggravating in the long run.
Karen
Given the response from John, I’ll leave Vista where it is. This is also my business computer. I can’t afford to have it go under.
freelancer
@blahblahblah:
Slate, defending the indefensible.
Anne Laurie
Between the expensive new paperweight and Tunch’s last escape, John, perhaps you should go buy a lottery ticket, because kharma owes you a win!
Bob (Not B.o.B.)
I have a broader question:
Why do we put up with computers, what we will not accept in any other product?
Can you imagine a car that won’t start, requires regular restarts, has the maintenance schedule required by windows and anti-viral software updates, and only lasts about three years before it is junk? My truck has required nothing but oil changes (I suppose the equivalent of upgrades) for nearly 9 years and 80,000 miles. Plus a car has a zillion times more moving parts than a damn PC.
I could make similar comparisons to appliances and a bunch of other products we use.
When will the quality revolution reach the computer industry?
Maude
@hypusine: It’s a WUBI install. It sits inside of a folder in windows. At boot, you can choose win or ubuntu. It can be removed without bothering Uncle Bill.
I’ve done ubuntu upgrades, I floated in and out of the room. No problems and never lost any apps or anything else.
Some Linux distros may require the terminal, but not ubuntu. It’s a 25 minute install.
delk
@Janefinch:
Mostly because a lot of new people have bought Macs recently and are confused.
CalD
If it’s any consolation, the Mac mini we designated as our Snow Leopard test machine required a new motherboard before we could “downgrade” back to Leopard (after finding that Snow Leopard broke most important program we need run on that machine). I typically wait until at least SP1 before installing any new release of Windows and I always do a clean install when I do, and I will readily admit that these are things I learned the hard way.
But I have to say that in the worst Windows upgrade horror stories I’ve survived or ever even heard of, no actual hardware was ever destroyed by an OS upgrade. And according to the service tech at our local Apple store, this was not an isolated occurrence. She said she’d already had to replace the system boards on two or three Macbooks that came with the same problem and this was only a week into the 10.6 release.
Jerome McDonough
While I love Macs and am happier now that I’m in an all Mac household than our previous all-Windows household…. OS upgrades universally suck on *ALL* platforms now. I just tried to upgrade an OS X 10.4 server to 10.5. It bombed in the middle of the upgrade, leaving me with no choice but to do a full clean install. I was lucky. I’d back up all of my user data. But all of the application installations, all of the configuration I’d done on my development environment, all toast.
The sysadmins at my school have told me that they’ve completely given up on doing ‘upgrades’ of operating systems. They always do a clean install of a new OS and port data over on to it, and live with the reconfiguration/reinstallation of software, because if you plan for it, it’s easier than the nightmare you end up dealing with during an ‘upgrade.’
Tom Betz
@Comrade Darkness
Yes, disable automatic updates. Leave notifications turned on if you like, but by damn, it’s not going to download and install anything unless I give it the okay, and I’ve set the table for the update to be installed with a minimum of breakage.
I’ve seen too many PCs turned needlessly into toasters by the auto-updates rebooting the PC at a really bad time. I use other protective measures to help me defend against zero-day stuff.
Phoenix Woman
@L. Ron Obama:
Yeah, but my first reaction is to reach for the non-existent mouse (he doesn’t have room for one on his bedside table).
Jon H
@Jerome McDonough: ” I just tried to upgrade an OS X 10.4 server to 10.5. It bombed in the middle of the upgrade, leaving me with no choice but to do a full clean install.”
Nowadays, with Time Machine backups, it’s pretty easy to do a wipe, full-install, and restore. Not fast, but easy.
Jon H
@Jerome McDonough: ” I just tried to upgrade an OS X 10.4 server to 10.5. It bombed in the middle of the upgrade, leaving me with no choice but to do a full clean install.”
Nowadays, with Time Machine backups, it’s pretty easy to do a wipe, full-install, and restore. Not fast, but easy.
Macjazz
Linux. Get Ubuntu – or a nice user friendly variant like Linux Mint – free. http://www.ubuntu.com/
Bought a new computer a while back with Vista OS. Vista really does suck, as so many have said. Drove me to install Linux (Mint 6).
Sounds like the new Windows 7 may be more of the same, though the jury still out, obviously. Meet the new Windows, same as the old Windows?
LiberalTarian
Um, actually, men do have certain uses for their nipples. They generally involve sex and such types of things. And yes, I have personal knowledge.
And for heavens’ sake, every mammal has nipples. Doesn’t matter if you are male, and sometimes they work, see lactating men and goats, etc.