In two short weeks I trashed both my desktop and my new laptop computer. On the desktop, I foolishly applied a dozen different updates from a lot of different programs and drivers, along with Zone Alarm and a two other new apps. After rebooting, the PC was fine until the screen saver came on, then it blue-screened. This would be my first BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) in years and it was the first I had seen in Vista.
I tried as hard as I could to solve the problem but in the end gave up in frustration. It was time to restore from backup (no, this is not going to be another backup lecture). The data backup was current and the System backup was a month old, both of which were acceptable. The trouble was the Acronis backup program I was using was flawed (Acronis version 10). Because I didn't understand the nuances of the program, I had made a file-by-file backup, not an "image". When it restored, it interlaced the restored with existing files (including a beta-copy of Vista SP1 that I wanted to remove). The end-result was the machine still blue-screened and SP1-beta was still installed. This was not what I expected.
The next step was to nuke the hard disk and restore on what is affectionately called a bare-metal disk. It was a trick to delete the partition (I had to boot from a separate disk and then connect to the drive - they don't make this easy any more). The restore was flawless, except for the minor fact the computer wouldn't boot (remember, this was a file-by-file backup, not an image). For a fleeting moment I regretted my decision to go down this path. It took another hour of geekdom before I finally coaxed the machine into behaving and by this time I really began to hate Microsoft's OS Upgrade disks -- you can't recover from a catastrophe with them.
The restore wasn't entirely Acronis's fault. I didn't use the Disk-Image part of their program, which is my-bad.
After that fiasco, things got worse. The very next weekend, I was dinking around with the new laptop and tried to upgrade my MP3 MusicMatch player. "Dinking around" really meant I was abusive as I tried to install their "Plus" version. Things didn't go well and I am nearly ashamed to say no amount of de-installing or re-installing helped the poor machine. When I was done, the software was a quivering mass of electrons. A restore would be nice, but since the laptop is only a few weeks old, I hadn't made a backup yet.
There was no choice in this matter: Nuke this hard disk and start from scratch, restoring to the OEM version of Windows and re-installing everything. A friend at work put it this way: "At least you know how to do that; most people would have to buy a new laptop." Some solace that was. Rebuilding from scratch takes a huge amount of time. The drivers alone took several hours to find and download and there is a long list of applications and all of their configuring you have to do. I'm comfortable doing all this but it still took 14 hours and after three days I'm still fiddling with the system. I never want to do this again. A backup was made as soon as the machine was stable.
During all this, my once-proud 60GB external USB hard disk appears to have shrunk. Between backing up Frankenputers 7, 8, Fortran the new laptop, and the old Electra laptop, there was no more room. The real cause are the two Vista computers because they hog about 3 or 4 times as much disk space when compared to XP. This can only be solved with more money. I'd like to buy a half-terabyte drive, which can be found for $130. Isn't this amazing? (See followup-article: Review: Maxtor Mini External USB)
The laptop re-build had a silver lining: There is a particularly annoying directory in Windows Vista called "WinSXS", which stands for "side-by-side." As you install programs, Vista stores each program's DLL library in its own folder. With this, "DLL Hell" is less of an issue but the net effect is your workstation might have 30 or 40 copies of the same DLL, where each could be different versions or the same. The only trouble is Microsoft didn't provide a way to clean this directory and de-installing an application does not clean these files.
Why do I care about this WinSXS directory? I noted earlier in the week the directory occupied 7GB (Gigabytes!) of disk. Even though the new laptop was only a few weeks old, the directory had already swollen to a huge mess. This means backups and defrags take forever. Because the directory is driven by hidden processes and the names are encoded, you don't dare mess with them. Besides, Vista secures the folder so tightly that you couldn't do anything in there, even if you wanted. Naturally, I tried.
When I was done re-imaging (being careful to not install test programs or re-install MusicMatch five times), the directory is now (only) 3.7G. Hopefully Microsoft will provide an SXS cleanup tool some day. In the mean time, both computers are online. Onward to the next disaster.
Related articles:
Rebuilding Windows from Scratch
Review: Maxtor Mini External USB
Disk Image Cleanup Steps
Vista Spiffs
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