Yesterday I spent the better part of the afternoon taking my daughter’s computer back to ground zero. I reinstalled a fresh copy of XP, which took two hours, and then updated everything I thought she needed: Windows update, flash, shockwave, adobe reader, the latest Firefox. She is six years old, and it doesn’t take her long to botch up a computer, even though I lock things down pretty well.
After I was finished, she was happy to have her computer back and running well, and I had her test a few of her favorite websites so I could put them on her desktop. She immediately noticed there was no sound on any of her favorites, including Noggin, Barbie.com, playhousedisney, etc. But when I went to YouTube, videos played just fine, sound and all. And her educational CD’s, like Putt Putt goes to the Circus, and I Spy Puppet Playhouse, worked fine as well. I toyed with the sound controls, looked for weirdness in the device manager, and could not figure it out. After about a half-hour, it occurred to me; this was a Java issue. I installed Java Console, requested an update, and voila, all of her websites were working.
What bugs me is all the “pick up” stuff I have to do every time I install a new machine, or reinstall an old one. I keep a list of things to “check” but Java wasn’t on that list before. In fact, I’ve never had to forcefully load Java in any previous instance of an install/reinstall, so I’m a bit perturbed. Why is that when we install a new browser on a new machine, all of the requisite plug-ins and updates to browser-associated software doesn’t occur too? Is it really that much to ask that the web browser, upon install, goes out and prompts for any updates so you can get them all done in one fell swoop? There is no purpose to running any browser unless you have flash, shockwave, Adobe Reader, and Java all at their latest levels. Surfing is virtually impossible without them in this day and age.
After about three hours of working on that machine, wasting another half hour trying to figure out why something wasn’t working correctly was really pushing my buttons. No wonder we geeks are getting a bit cranky these days, when what should take an hour and be easy can’t be accomplished without a playbook close at hand.
My New and Improved playbook now includes the note to update Java. But I contend that my playbook shouldn’t need such detailed instructions.
Yes, there are lots of things I COULD have done differently, but:
1. The ghosted image I had of her machine was corrupted as the hard drive I had it on had failed. I have Ghost and it works great…as long as the drive you’re backing up onto doesn’t fail.
2. My home NAS is not what it could be, and I don’t have enough space to keep images “live” on my NAS. $$’s prevent me from upgrading at this point. I’ve concentrated on backing up critical information, like photographs from everyone’s digital camera uploads and downloaded programs, rather than entire images.
3. I’m a geek and I like to experiment. I lock down machines pretty far, but obviously not far enough if my six year old could botch her image in a little over six months. So, I have locked it down further, and installed even more restrictive software, to see how it goes.
4. It’s a slow machine, and it took forever to get it all installed and back up to speed.
I stand by my statement that there shouldn’t be a NEED to keep a list of what has to be upgraded if you have to do a reinstall. These things should be browser-attached so that the prompts are given when you first open the browser after installing it. The upgrades should be running that seamlessly, IMHO.
suze filehippo.com has ready made or build your own update scripts that i have played with
This is where disk imaging is your friend.
Get the machine the way you want it once, then image it. Especially if this is something you’re having to do more than once or twice a year, it makes a lot more sense than doing installs by hand every time.
I keep at least two images on hand for every person’s machine in my house. One “just installed” pristene image, and one that I grab periodically, maybe once a month or so from their machines as they used them.
In most cases, if something happens I can just drop back to the last “running” image. In that case, they’re up and running again with very few updates, if any. If it’s something that’s been corrupt for a while in the background that crept into the last running image, worst case I drop back to the “just installed” image. In that case it’s like I just spent hours reinstalling windows, but I didn’t..I spent maybe 15 minutes to restore the image and another 20 to bring Windows, flash, java, shockwave up to date from the state it was in when I did the image after the install several months ago.
I usually use TeraByte BootitNG and/or Image for Windows to create and restore the images (they’re image-compatable), but I’ve used driveimageXML for it too. the Terabyte software isn’t free, but is really reasonably priced for what it is. Drive imageXML is free, but not quite as easy if you actually have to restore something and it’s a lot more sensitive to disk errors.
Lol @ you spending two hours on installing XP. Make a bootable USB image, NOW. Well under half an hour to install.
Besides, have you never heard of ghosting? It sounds like you could have saved a good few hours.
Unsubscribed in GR