since I upgraded to 7. Sorry, I know it doesn’t fit the song.
Anyhow, after fighting with a few ill-behaved installers, everything’s running.
I removed all the plugins and extensions from Firefox that I don’t have in a clean-slate install, figuring maybe one of the ones in my profile horked things. It seems to work, but I haven’t really pushed it.
Still bad that a single app (or an extension to same) can take the OS out.
Still investigating. Further news as events warrant.
Right. Got everything going again. Quickbooks? Check. Callstation (Voicemail and phone) Check. Pidgin? Check. Mozilla?
Not so check.
So I’m running Mozilla, doing the morning surf, and the window blinks and freezes. What follows next is a system fail of epic proportion. Yes, a 32-bit app Brought a 64-bit operating system to its knees.
So, not believing that this could possibly be the case, and figuring it must be hardware because both times it happened my RAID wanted to rebuild, I tested the drives. They’re fine. And Mozilla under 32 bit Fedora worked fine.
To test my hypothesis, I installed Opera and ran that all day.
The system’s still up.
You do the math. And yes, I googled, and found reports of Mozilla crashing on Win 7 x64, but not blowing Windows completely the fuck away.
I’ve finally gotten around to putting 7 on the Big Workstation. Went 64 bit and the whole nine. Decided to mimic the experience I’m putting my customers through by making it a domain member and working as a limited user.
What a pain in the ass.
Installing software is easier on 7 than XP as a limited user, I’ll grant that. But this arrangement only points out just how far behind the times software developers are. I mean, this has been an “official” best practices thing for the better part of a decade now, and software still doesn’t get it.
The big hitters (Office 2007, Visual Studio 2008) work fine when installed as “Administrator” but used as “BrianC”. In fact, most stuff does. FOSS like Pidgin and 7-Zip work fine.
But then there’s the exceptions. Quickbooks itself worked without an issue. But the Quickbooks Outlook Sync program only works for the user that installed it. So simply elevating to Administrator doesn’t cut it. So it’s log out, go back in as admin, bump my domain user to local administrator, go back in as me, and install.
Same thing with the Palm software. Desktop installed fine, but then started Hotsync in the Administrator context, rendering the first (bluetooth only, no USB drivers for you 64 bit folks!) sync useless. Where it gets worse is all the related apps. Documents To Go didn’t install itself properly (since it didn’t see a profile), Smartlist To Go wouldn’t install at all until I was a local administrator myself.
Come on folks, get with the times. Microsoft is trying to make an operating system that doesn’t get hosed by users running with Administrator privileges because you clowns can’t get your shit together and write software that allows people to run with lower privileges on their machines.