Once more, I’m just a slight bit annoyed at the level of incompetence the pile of crap I’m sitting in front of has been engineered. Not that I’m buying cheap hardware — I’ve learned that lesson long ago — it’s just that even the best, to put it simply, is just mediocre most of the time.
Whenever I boot my top-of-the-range Asus motherboard, I’m greeted by a colorful picture intended to hide the actual boot messages, lest they scare the user. On this screen is written “Performance, Stability, Reliabilty“. Yes, that immediately convinces me that this message reflects the actual work that went into these things.
When I turn off my PC at the boot screen, it will warn me that the previous boot failed and asks me whether I want to continue or enter the BIOS setup. If I select continue, this message will come up again at the next boot, and the next, and the next. But if I turn off my PC at the boot screen again, the message disappears. Yes - if the user says it’s alright, keep nagging him. But if the same error occurs again, then it’s probably alright.
Recently, my brand new Western Digital 1 TB HDD (Raid Edition 2) developed bad sectors. 1365 of them, even though it was never moved an inch.
To locate and mark all current defects on the drive, each sector needs to be written to. Windows Vista’s checkdisk of course restarts at sector 0 each time it is run. It takes more than 6 hours to reach sector 100 (!), making it… mildly… inpracticable to scan the entire disk in one session. So checkdisk is out of the equation.
Trying to force the HDD’s controller to mark the bad sectors by formatting the entire drive has the same issue. Windows Vista’s partition manager doesn’t resume formatting after a reboot. The partition will just be marked as successfully formatted when you reboot during formatting.
If you try to cancel the formatting process, nothing happens. Even Minutes later, there’s no reaction from Vista. So that tells me the reboot is probably not even waiting for the partition manager to finish, leaving the partition in who knows what state.
While I’m formatting, whenever the drive encounters a bad sector, Windows Vista will deep-freeze for a fraction of a second. So it becomes quite hard to click on anything with the mouse and preventing you from working or playing on the machine while the drive is being formatted. Of course, audio playback stops too, so should you decide to watch a movie instead, that experience is utterly destroyed as well.
I’d like to close with a list of the files I found in my Mercenaries 2 folder:
d3dx9d_27.dll d3dx9d_32.dll d3dx9d_34.dll D3DX9d_36.dll d3dx9_32.dll d3dx9_34.dll d3dx9_35.dll d3dx9_36.dll dbghelp.dll msvcp71.dll msvcp71d.dll msvcr71.dll msvcr71d.dll msvcr80.dll msvcr80d.dll xinput1_3.dll
For the non-programmers reading this, that’s the Visual C++ 2003 Runtime for C and for C++, the Visual C++ 2003 Debug Runtime for C and for C++, the Visual C++ 2005 Runtime for C, the Visual C++ 2005 Debug Runtime for C, D3DX from DirectX 9.0c December 2006, D3DX from DirectX 9.0c June 2007, D3DX from DirectX 9.0c August 2007 and D3DX from DirectX 9.0c November 2007.
Wow, just wow. Did anyone even have the slightest idea what they were doing? You’re not allowed to distribute even half of those DLLs in that form as per Microsoft’s license. I hope someone (hopefully a junior programmer or worse) just panicked and put everything he could think of in there to make it run because… the other possibility… scares me.
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