Blue Screen of Death

How Hewlett Packard roasted my chestnuts

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
4/22/07
http://www.mytown.ca

It all started when I suddenly got the blue screen of death on my monitor. Windows XP is a relatively stable OS, and I hadn’t seen one of those in quite a while. A quick investigation showed that my data drive was dying.
Well, these things happen. I made sure my backups were current, ordered a new drive, and pulled the dying drive out of the loop. I was mildly annoyed. While the computer was nearly six years old and due for trouble, the drive that failed was only two years old. But I had lost no data, and there was room on C for ongoing projects to reside.
It was a reminder to order a new computer in a month or so, when things slowed down and I could take time to make the move.
I ran a registry cleaner app, and was startled to see it register over 4,000 errors. There weren’t any apps on the dead drive; just data. But a quick check showed that nearly all the errors were addresses for data files that Windows expected to find on drive D. With my usual mumbled curses for Microsoft and a slight sense of foreboding, I told the app to clean all the dross out of the registry.
Windows still whined and howled and left little messes on the floor. The whole OS was over-engineered until hell wouldn’t have it, just so it could annoy users with the aggressive obsequiousness of a butler who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Oh, and to confound pirates, although it was spectacularly unsuccessful in that regard. My OS, confused by the loss of the D drive, would hang for several minutes at a time, and picked up the quaint new habit of waiting four minutes to load any program I told it to run.
The new drive arrived, a big external, and I plugged it in and began the three day process of data restore. I entertained vague hopes that Windows would be so happy to see the data drive back that it would run smoothly – or at least readily – again. No such luck.
Well, the Windows XP Pro had run for five years without major trouble, so maybe I couldn’t complain. Granted, it did so because I devoted about an hour a day to making sure it was healthy and happy. People routinely told me horror stories of having to format every year because XP would get so buggy and corrupted. And it was rapidly becoming clear that when the drive died, it inflicted a mortal injury to XP. I started researching what new computer to get.
I was annoyed about the dead drive, and at XP for failing to take it in stride, but feeling smug at the same time. At least I was prepared, and while the system was slowing me down, I was still able to move forward with several major projects.
I narrowed my choices down to an AMD dual core. Both Acer and Hewlett Packard had models that fitted the bill. Same price. I shrugged, and decided to order the HP through Outpost.com, aka Fry’s. HP’s printers aren’t what they used to be, but the general malaise that has gripped that company hadn’t yet compromised their desktop units. Or so I’d been told. A little voice in the back of my head reminded me that I had switched to all Canons in my printer lineup in the past year because I was unhappy with HP’s operation costs and general performance.
Fry’s has a bad reputation for customer service. Mostly, that it doesn’t offer any. That’s not entirely true, but Fry’s is the sort of place where I wouldn’t recommend anyone go if they didn’t know exactly what they wanted, and why. Otherwise you are facing a million choices and no explanations as to what they mean. If you know what you want, though, Fry’s has it, and usually at the best price around.
It took them five days to admit that the computer – which they were still advertising – had sold out and was on back order. I called them, and the woman said that it could be up to a month, and did I want to cancel my order. I asked why they were still advertising the system if it was sold out, and she had no answer, but I hoped the fact that I raised the point would cause them to expedite.
It might have. The computer turned up ten days later. Meanwhile, my old system was getting wonkier and wonkier. I was very glad to see the new system.
It was DOA. I would fire it up, and the Windows flash screen would come up, and the odd new rotating “computer is thinking, please go away” cursor would sit in the middle of the screen and rotate. It was computing, reduced to a kind of a zen perfection. You just stared at the spinnerette and imagined the things you could be doing.
HP’s tech support is the usual grind. They’re all in India, and they are pretty much trained to ask a couple of dozen stock questions. Even if they have any actual technical knowledge, they are forbidden from doing anything outside the corporate flow chart as far as debugging goes, and it’s predicated on the notion that their users are idiots. So we went through all the things I had already tried, such as unplugging all the peripherals, turning the machine off and on, and then turning it on while tapping F11, then F10, then F8. At which point, “Robert” told me, “Please to excuse, I shall return shortly”. (For some reason, they’ve given their tech reps Anglo names. Probably to save five minutes on each call while some incredulous hick asks, “WHAT did you say your name was? That’s just your first name? Holy smokes! Whal, whut do they call ewe when yer at home?” But I always feel like it’s a really clumsy subterfuge, so people won’t know they are dealing with Indians. I can just see it now. “Oh, hyes, my name is Robert, and I am a true Yankee Doodle Dandy. And to prove it, I shall inquire most solicitiously after the fortunes of my favorite cricket team, the San Francisco Dodgers!”) While Robert was gone, they played Christmas muzak at me. In March.
Robert came back and announced that he would have system restore disks sent to me, and that I could expect them in three days. Why they weren’t included with the system in the first place is a mystery for the ages. It used to be that every new computer came with a Windows disk. No more.
Over the weekend, I partitioned the drive and installed Ubuntu 64, a Linux operating system designed for the 64-bit chips. It was blindingly fast, and supported all my peripherals, including the Canon 9000 printer, a technology that is only six months old. The computer loved Ubuntu, and if there was any Linux software out there that could read Corel Draw X3 or Word Perfect files, I would have switched over in an instant. I was awed at how easy it was to acquire and install new software. All free, all legal.
The disks turned up, and I fired them up. On disk two, it bombed. I tried again. It bombed again. So back to Robert, turn machine off and on, and chestnuts roasting on an open fire. After 50 minutes of that, Robert announced that I would have to send the computer back, that a switch on the main board was at fault.
“That’s it? A jumper needs to be reset? Hell, tell me which one! I can do that in 30 seconds!”
But Robert wouldn’t hear of it. It would void the warranty. Nor could I just send the computer back in the original packaging, which was still sitting on the floor of my office. Robert had to send an empty box with the bill of lading and a form for me to fill out describing what the computer was doing (“Nothing”).
That was on a Thursday. The empty box arrived on a Tuesday, and I was like a kid on Christmas morning, dancing around the office and singing, “The empty box is here! The empty box is here!” while my wife assured my clients that she was looking into nursing homes.
So I stuffed the computer in the empty box, and sent the not-quite-so-empty box off to some place in Kentucky. In the meantime, the old computer was driving me nuts, but I didn’t want to do a full format. I had a Service Pack3 DVD that I had stumbled across, and decided to install over my SP2 version and see what happened. At worst, I figured I could just nuke the drive and start all over with the original copy. In the meantime, I just wanted something to get through the next five days or so. At this point, it had been five weeks since the initial drive crash, and four weeks since I ordered the new computer.
It installed, and the long hangs and other glitches promptly vanished, only to be replaced with some new ones. It no longer recognized my version of Corel Draw as legitimate, which I found faintly ironic. Nor did it like Photo Impact, my favorite graphics program. Fortunately, Corel Draw reverted to demo mode, which meant I could use that copy for 30 days. And I downloaded GIMP, an excellent freeware version of Photoshop (awkward interface, though). I could get by. And did. At one point, I tried putting my copy of Windows in and formatting the drive. It told me it couldn’t format the drive because a newer version of Windows was on the drive. So I said fuggit, concluding that it was good enough to get by on. And I could now get a reasonable amount of work done.
The new computer arrived six days later – almost five weeks after I first ordered it – and it fired up perfectly. I spend some time acquainting myself with Vista (more on that next week), and started setting up the peripherals. I already had the Vista drivers for my printers in a download section on my data disk, and they worked fine. No problems with the monitor, or the card reader (which was now obsolete anyway, as the computer had one of those 8-in-1 deals on the front panel.)
But the scanner wouldn’t respond. I hadn’t stopped to consider the scanner. It was a six year old model, but a high end one, and the technology for scanners hasn’t changed that much. It was a USB 2.0 model, and I didn’t see why it wouldn’t run under Vista.
It was a Hewlett Packard scanner, so I went to the HP site, where I was greeted with a notice telling me HP wasn’t going to be developing drivers for that scanner because it was six years old. Even though the new computer was an HP. I was already sorry I hadn’t ordered the Acer instead. That didn’t help.
Aha! Ubuntu supported the scanner! I would just partition the drive, and install Ubuntu, and that would serve as a kludge until I could get a new scanner. So I did. Ubuntu installed perfectly, ran perfectly, scanned perfectly. I saved the image to disk, and then switched to Windows to make sure my software could read the new file.
Windows wouldn’t fire up. We were back to the cosmic whirling eye of zen computing.
Back to Robert and Hewlett Packard roasting on an open fire. It seems that HP and Microsoft had collaborated to make it so any effort to partition the drive (which was a mirror, rather than a conventional install) would scramble the contents. They had it rigged so you couldn’t run a second operating system on the main drive. The only thing for it would be to restore the mirror install.
Well, I just happened to have the disks at hand. I was pissed about losing a days’ work, and more pissed at how they had the setup gimmicked, but was willing to file it under “live and learn.”
The mirror disks didn’t have a format function. But you have to format the drive in order to perform a mirror install.
I eyed my XP Pro disk. If it was loath to format a drive with SP3, what would it do with one that might contain recognizable remains of Vista?
With considerable dread, I put the disk in. It began the format, and was done in just twenty minutes. Those SATA drives are pretty fast. It then proceeded to install XP Pro, and did so in a total of nine minutes. That impressed me. An XP Pro install on a 32 bit machine usually takes about 45 minutes.
Then I took the Vista disks and ran the install. It gave me an advisory that while it was doing this, various messages would appear on the screen, and that it was important not to respond to any of them.
After an hour, by which time I was wondering why it was taking so long, a message appeared telling me the procedure was done, and to click here to reboot. So I did.
Turned out that was one of the dummy messages they warned me about, and it caused the install to bomb. At that point, I went home in disgust.
I repeated the procedure bright and early the next day. After two hours, I contacted Robert, roasting on an open fire, and asked if this was NORMAL. “Oh, hyes,” I was assured. “It normally takes two to two and a half hours.”
It did take two and a half hours. Mind you, this is the same system that installed XP Pro in nine minutes. During which it put a bewildering array of messages up, most of which seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with the mirroring process. And all of which had to be ignored. I remember the first time I installed an operating system, back in 1984. It was a lot easier than this, even though this didn’t require any input from me. It was more informative and a whole lot less confusing.
After that, and with a clean install in place and all my major programs in and (mostly) running happily, I considered what to do about the scanner. I wanted Ubuntu, and could have easily bought a second external drive to use as my Ubuntu drive. But I didn’t NEED it right away. Easier to just buy a new scanner.
HP had one for a reasonable price that would fit my needs. I passed. I suspect it will be quite a while, if ever, before I buy another HP product. Instead, I ordered a Canon 8600. I took a chance and ordered it through Fry’s.
It arrived two days later, and in perfect working order.

Next week: A strange new Vista