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Wasting Time Fixing Computers
An anonymous reader writes "Interesting experiment by Marshall Brain, where he tracked every time-wasting error, repair, annoyance on his home network for one month. He logs 11 hours and 20 minutes of crap, everything from driver problems to forced upgrades, spam overflows... you name it. Anyone on /. is experiencing the same thing. Is it going to get better or worse in 2004, and how much time are we all wasting?"
With a Dell last Christmas....she called and went through the support desk script and it was determined that she had a software driver issue. They would send out a new driver (since she couldn't access the internet...it was a modem driver). 1 month later and over 40 hrs logged on hold and tech support, she finally went to a friends house, downloaded the driver to a floppy, installed it and it still didn't work. Called Dell and they finally send a tech to replace the modem.
I can beleive it, I've seen it.
WTF? Over?
Mentioned at the end of the article is the question of what SIRCS was during startup. It would appear to be the Sony InfraRed control system USB driver.
While perusing the Google results, another writer in another blog was pondering whether SIRCS was responsible for mysterious behavior in his PC. When nothing seems to make sense it is easy to blame what is visible.
Thinking back to my support problems, the only recurring issue is on my roommate's PC, which has a flakey WLAN card. I also have to occasionally reboot my cable modem and the router, but I chalk that up to consumer grade hardware.
Thus, 90% of my problems are hardware related, but it doesnt really take very long.
The OS never locks up, the computers dont get viruses or bugs, etc. Oh ya, and I forgot to mention: the entire network runs on Windows 2000.
My point is, if you know what you are doing, and have a smart design, you eliminate almost all of your support issues.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
> but I still have to fiddle with it to get Flash or
> Real work with Mozilla and so on.
Buy a Mandrake pack, it installs by default with a multimedia install.
Three freaking hours. You see, I wanted to connect to MSN with GAIM. To do this, I have to enable SSL. So I set the flag, and run configure, and it silently fails. After a few minutes I realize it can't find the mozilla-nss packages, so I download and install them. Then I run configure again, and it fails because it can't find some declaration for certain functions. I pour over the GAIM source code, and no luck.
Now the precompiled RPM has SSL enabled, so I d/l it to install. But, it also has GTKSpelling installed, but I can't use it unless I install gtkspell which requires opencdk and aspell and lib-crypt and about three other packages. I download and install all this crap, and I run configure for gaim, and I get the same damn error.
Now, GAIM doesn't have to use NSS for encryption, it can use (somethign else). I download something else, and the 10 packages it depends on, and I still get the same exact compile error. Long story short - I don't have MSN enabled yet, and I don't htink I will.
I won't even tell you the pain in the ass that is realplayer, which I should have known would be a mistake to install.
This pretty much proves that this sentence used by some people is false.
I spend a lot of time with computers, and it's consistently only Windows what makes me waste my time. Although these days I don't use Windows very often, here's a comparison:
Windows 2000:
It took me *one week* to install it. I finished the install, and decided to install SP3 that I already had downloaded, thinking to upgrade to SP4 later to save download time. Big error. It wouldn't boot after that, locking up in the logo screen. Later it turned out it was because I didn't have the "power management" driver for my motherboard. The driver wouldn't install in safe mode because it couldn't detect the hardware (well, THANK YOU, whoever had that nice userfriendly idea).
After a few days it turned out that it randomly managed to boot in normal mode, which allowed me to install the driver.
Total time lost must have been about 10 hours. Also, some things couldn't be done since I couldn't get it to work for that week.
Windows 98:
This one probably made me lose also a significant amount of time, spread over a month. I was having strange random errors with it. Things like "Out of memory" when I obviously had more than enough RAM.
Later, it finally turned out that it didn't work with more than 512MB RAM, and I had 1GB. Could have warned me about that at least.
Bye bye Win98. More time lost to make sure everything that was in the Win98 drive is backed up and moved to Win2K.
Linux (Gentoo):
reconfiguring X for my LCD monitor. Total maybe about 15 minutes or so.
In case somebody is wondering about the time lost to install it, it must have been about 30 minutes at most, because I installed it while using Debian.
After these problems and many others, I've pretty much completely switched to Linux, with Windows ocasionally running in vmware. I have a separate VM for every task, which seems the only way of making it reliable...
BTW, I have Windows NT servers with over a year of uptime, excluding time spent afterhours applying updates (which you can bitch about all you want, but the fact remains that MS doesnt have no reboot patches), and I have Win2k servers with at least that long. A month uptime is long? No way, only a month of uptime is weak, and there is either a hardware issue, a third-party driver issue, or caused by a non-MS program you are running. So can a Windows box run for over a year without crashing? Hell ya. Easily.
You're kind of cheating there by disregarding the restarts due to necessary patches. Sure, your average linux distribution needs to be patches once in a while as well, but rarely (kernel) to the point of having to reboot everything. Simply rebooting NT will actually solve a lot of problems because every dinky piece of software running on it will be started anew, and memory leaks, stalled/locked/deadlocked software and such disappear..
Still, Microsoft understands very well that as long as it's scheduled downtime, nobody cares about it, as it's after hours.. And, most people don't realize this, but 99% uptime means 14.4 minutes of downtime every 24 hours. If you save that up over a month (an attainable uptime even with NT 4.0) you get over 7 hours to go down at your choosing.. And if High Availability actually matters to you, they'll gladly charge you for it.
BTW a lot of patches that tell you to reboot don't actually need the system to reboot.. Simply stopping and restarting some services will do nicely if that's even needed at all - just like most patches on linux or a BSD. It seems to me that Microsoft views the "forced reboot" as a maintenance chore, much like defragging your hard disk.. Software installs will often prompt you to reboot as well - even though it's totally unnecessary.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
That's *exactly* why I got an iBook 9 months back. My Windows based system kept giving me problems. Anymore, I don't like having to deal with all the little details of why something isn't working. If I choose to dig down and explore on my own, that's one thing. To be forced into it to resolve some error or other irritant isn't what it used to be for me.
I've found the Mac to be really simple and well designed. It really does just work, for the most part. I bought w/o an Airport card and added one in about 4 months ago and it was the easiest computer upgrade I've done in 15 years. The biggest problem I've had was figuring out why the wireless was working one day and not the next at a different location. (It was software setting that just needed to be changed)
Incidentally, the Mac seems to be a great platform for SW development. Apple provides all the tools needed at no charge.
Haven't decided to completely abandon my Windows desktop for a Mac though.
In my experience, even Win2k does deteriorate and need reinstalling - after the reinstall the machine is much snappier but then it starts to slow down again. I was mostly thinking of 95/98/ME though. Since Internet Explorer comes with the OS it's fair to count its failings as failings of Windows, especially since we count any security holes of exim or sshd or bind as weaknesses in Linux.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
You realize how much Windows software will not work? Ever since I upgraded to Win2K, I have made sure to never run with admin privileges. From my Unix background, this was the only sane way to run.
Then, you being to realize how much crappy sofware wants to write logfiles inside of its directory or other random places about the hard drive. It took me forever to figure out what files the apps wanted to fart around with, and either move them into a writable "home" style directory or add the right bits so it could write to them.
Forget trying to run anything if you're not a "Power User". Gave up on that a long time ago.
Then there are the few that don't won't work at all unless you have unfettered access to everything.
I mean, I can run this way, but there's no way in hell my sister or parents could. It has to be wide open, otherwise nothing would work for them.
One hopes that with XP getting popular apps will become better-behaved. But as long as the default remain "I'm an admin, he's an admin, she's admin, wouldn't you like to be an admin too?" I suspect not.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
I run Solaris, Linux, and Windows at home. After a year of Solaris being my most heavily used platform, I find that it's also the lowest admin-time-cost platform of the three. Upgrades and updates are fast and painless, and fairly infrequent. Versionitis is a non-issue, except when it comes to applications (which have generally been developed on Linux, curiously).
I find that Linux is still a horrible mishmash of interdependencies, some of which are mutually exclusive. apt-get makes it MUCH easier to deal with, but you still do have to deal with it one way or another. Windows is worse--they have a very nice driver install/upgrade system that no vendors in existence seem to use; and entropy forces a clean reinstall of Windows every 12-18 months, no matter what you do.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
There is pretty much a new MS update every day.
Well, I run XP Pro at home and at work, and there most certianly are not updates "pretty much... every day". It's not even every week, and that's including the non-critical ones.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Well this is merely hearsay "I have a friend..." Moreover, we know that this hearsay is false, because It could never, take 2 to 3 days to load Mac OS X (any version) and all of one's applications. That figure is simply preposterous.
Loading Mac OS X, and doing a fairly complicated customization (such as installing a couple of open source lisps, slime, and configuring emacs to work with them), in the worst possible case, takes 4 or 5 hours. Loading applications is much quicker - you just drag and drop them from your backups. Very few require that they be installed with the installer again. I just did a clean install on a G4 of Panther, and restored over 50 apps from backups, just to eliminate any unnecessary frameworks etc. that may have accumulated on the machine, before installing Panther. The whole process took about 4 hours, and most of that was writing the backups to an external firewire drive, and copying them back to the G4's internal IDE drive (I have a large CD collection, and a correspondingly large iTunes library).
The hearsay about "2 to 3 days" is simply false - period.
In fact, the only updates that *need* to be applied to a Mac OS X machine are the security updates, and these are issued, on average, every two weeks, to once a month.
:-) I just counted mine the other day to make a point with some troglodyte XP user.
Actually, the true average is less than once per month.
Between 9/20/02 and 12/19/03, Apple released 13 security-specific updates for installs of OS 10.2. Two of those were for included applications (one for IE, one for Stuffit Expander). So that's a grand total of 11 security updates in 15 months. Anyone running Windows want to check their install history and count their security updates between those two dates?
It's called bias.
It's called, you don't know what you're talking about.
Binary nVidia drivers update, Linux 2.4.x kernel: under 5 minutes.
Linmodem from Netodragon, driver compile, setup, and install + setup time for wvdial: under 10 minutes.
Driver compile and installation for oddball cd-rom: under 5 minutes.
Networking problems with Linux in the last month: none.
Forced upgrades with Linux in the last month: none.
Necessary patch fixes in the last month. Rough estimate? 2 hours tops including download times, and that's without up2date or apt-get type tools.
Total estimated time to bring my XP machine up to snuff with all the patches and other bullshit that's come out since I installed it: easily 5+ hours not including download times.
Oh, and by the way: time spent maintaining my minimal Linux firewall/router: 1 hour. Compiled a new kernel. All that time is COMPLETELY rebuilding the OS to suit a changed need, something that is beyond a mere "hassle" with Windows.
Sorry, the bias is justified. Maintaining Windows is an ENORMOUS hassle thanks to all the locked down, zipped up, "it's our way or no way" attitude of the Redmond elite. Swing it whatever way you want. Spend time maintaining average Linux and average Windows distros and you'll pick up a nasty addiction to painkillers from Windows, not Linux (unless you're one of those morons that expects Linux, a completely different operating system that was derived from a completely different philosophy for computer systems, to work just like Windows in which case you'll just ditch it because you're too dumb to realize it's not the same O/S ["you" is used figuratively, not referring to "you the poster" personally]). Spend time maintaining "wierd" configurations for pretty much any system and you're in for trouble.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!