It all started so innocently. I was going through my test plans, and saw that I should revisit Login functionality. The first few testcases involved web-user-interface testing through MSIE, so I fired it up.
"There is a new version of Internet Explorer available!" it crowed at me upon launch. Well, not surprising, I guess; I don't use the browser very much except when testing calls for it. So I click where it tells me to click, I wait about half an hour, and it tells me I'm upgraded to IE6. Okay, nifty. "Please reboot now," it says.
Well, fine. Par for the course when the OS thinks the browser is part of it. I reboot, and when the machine comes back up and tries to log onto the corporate network, the NT Logon Script goes nuts-- something crashes with an illegal operation, something else in a DOS box starts to spin out of control in an apparent infinite loop, and only repeated cancelings and oaths get it to stop. I hunt down Robin, our IT guy, and ask him what the problem might be.
"Oh-- you're using Windows 98," he says, upon seeing my machine. "That's your problem." Turns out the logon script no longer supports Win98. Okay, fine-- I'll upgrade to Windows 2000. Not a problem. ("Don't worry-- I won't make you run Windows XP. I don't know of any IT shop in the country that has allowed Windows XP in yet," he reassures me.)
So in goes the Win2K MSDN disc. "Would you like to upgrade to Windows 2000?" Why yes. It does its thing, I go through some bizarre BIOS-checking and hardware-compatibility-checking pseudo-web-presentation things, and it finally tells me that I've answered all the questions I'll need to. "The process will take approximately 40-55 minutes," it says confidently. "Your machine will reboot four times." (Four times? Okay, I'm sure that's all necessary for some bizarre black magic it does-- we can't expect it to do it all in one shot like most operating systems, right?) And then it goes to shut down.
"Windows 98 is shutting down," it tells me. That full-screen 320x200 splash screen sits there motionless for ten minutes before I decide that I'm not getting anywhere this way; it's already written to my boot blocks, I figure. It can't do any more damage if I just reboot it, right? Well, what the hell. Ctrl+Alt+Delete has no effect anyway, so I hit the reset button.
It does its 80x25 text-mode thing; oddly comforting to know that in the 21st Century, Wintel boxes still look like MS-DOS if you strip away the blankets of comfort that swath them during normal operation. It finishes that and automatically reboots a second time.
Ooh, now we're in graphics mode-- sort of, anyway. Sixteen colors of glory. "Windows will now attempt to detect hardware like your mouse and keyboard," it says. (Never mind that my mouse and keyboard both work fine-- see, there's the pointer moving around.) "Your screen may flicker for a few seconds during this process." Fine; no problem. I've done this about a bazillion times before. What could go wrong?
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That's what my screen turned into after the progress bar got about halfway across the screen. It flips into text mode, and suddenly we've got a screen full of apostrophes (or backquotes, or whatever). And the system is frozen, of course; not even a Ctrl+Alt+Del can wake it. So in the middle of an installation or not, I hit Reset again.
Same process. Same detection screen. Same progress bar, and BOOM! Same screen full of backquotes.
I call some team members over. They've never seen anything like this before. I call Robin over. He's never seen anything like this before. Now, I can specifically recall seeing exactly this same thing happening about a year ago when I upgraded our entire VoIP lab to Win2K, but for the life of me I can't remember what the hell I did to solve it then, or whether I ever did. So I tell myself to just calmly take the CD out and put it into my NT4 server box, which I also need to upgrate to Win2K in order to test PolicyCenter, our centralized server product. Note that the server box has exactly the same hardware as the first machine.
"Would you like to upgrade to Windows 2000?" Why, yes. Thank you for asking. Of course, this time it's Win2K Server, not Professional; so they figure I don't need to see the pseudo-web-page things about BIOS compatibility or upgrade packs; instead, it's just something about Signed Applications or something-- aw, skip it. Off I go into the reboot cycle.
Text mode thing: fine. Conversion to NTFS: Not needed. Keyboard and mouse detection stage.... I brace myself, expecting a screen full of backquotes. But no... it actually completes this stage without incident. Took a bloody long time, but it worked.
Ah, now for the actual installation part. They said 40-55 minutes, right? Well, about 30 minutes into "Installing Distributed Transaction Manager" without the progress bar advancing by so much as one pixel, I start to get a little suspicious. By the time it has taken 15 additional minutes on "Installing COM+", I am downright perturbed. My eyes are starting to hurt. But-- wait! It's done! An hour has passed, but it's done! Just "a few final tasks", and I'm home free! Four simple check-box items!
"Installing Start Menu Items" goes by without incident. And then "Registering Components"... and the progress bar gets about 30% of the way through-- and then stops.
Thirty-five minutes later, the progress bar has not moved a micron. "What are you doing? WHAT are you DOING?!" I shout at it repeatedly; but of course there's no "console" or anything (like in Mac OS X and every UNIX installer) to give me a straight answer. The hard disk light isn't blinking. My mouse still works, though, so I use it to mark my place on the progress bar and take the CD out to try some more troubleshooting on the first machine, my desktop box-- the one with four years' worth of archived work data, all my e-mail, all my software, all my test tools and so on-- the one that is currently a screen full of apostrophes.
David gets back to me to tell me that he was able to find nothing about this problem on Microsoft's support site, which (in accordance with their annual custom) they have helpfully reorganized to take previously convenient and accessible information and seal it away in a vault so that the only way to find anything out is to know what you're looking for beforehand; so no luck there. He gives me four floppy disks-- "Just use the 'Repair Windows 2000 installation' option", he suggests. Floppies? Windows boxes still depend on floppies? Well, whatever. I go back to the box and load up the floppies, one after another, into the little DOS text-mode thing. Fifteen minutes, and the thing is finally loaded-- and meanwhile my server installation hasn't moved a muscle. The progress bar is still right where I marked it.
"Repair Windows 2000 Installation," I almost pleadingly select. It pops up a choice: "Press 'C' to use the 'Repair Console', or press 'R' to use the 'Emergency Repair Mode'." Mmmkay... with some trepidation, I press 'C'.
"Enter your Administrator password!" What? I don't HAVE one! I never got that far in the installation, dumbass! Well, okay, I try a blank password-- and it works. I know this because it gives me... a C:\WINDOWS\> prompt. Oh, goodie. I'm sure I can do a lot of good here. I look around, conclude that this isn't where I wanted to be. So I type "exit", and... the machine reboots.
AAaaaruuuugh! No, I am not spending another fifteen minutes putting in floppy after floppy and waiting for this damn thing to load "TOSHIBA Floppy Disk Driver for Laptop LT675A" and "Adaptec SCSI Adapter 29106 Ultra Fast Wide Deep Long SCSI-17b" just to try whatever the hell this 'Emergency Repair Mode' might be-- which clearly isn't going to help much on a system where nothing has even really been installed yet. I yank the last disk out of the drive, and it reboots right back into the keyboard/mouse check screen-- and back to the apostrophes.
But wait! The server installation suddenly moved! 55 minutes later and it's finally making progress on "Registering Components" once again! Ha ha ha haah! We get signal! Ooh, wait-- it's hung up again. But no, only five minutes later and it's finished! Now only "Saving Changes to Files", and then "Deleting Unnecessary Temporary Files", and we're done! Boom-- it's finished, and we reboot! Hip hip hooray!
Well, one more reboot, that is. After I log in to the Win2K desktop, it tells me some stuff about driver installation being complete, and (of course) "One or more drivers or services failed to start up". Nice-- sure am glad this thing installed so cleanly. I reboot as instructed, and back it comes.
...Or does it? This time, after I log in to the network, it takes fifteen minutes for it to give me mouse control. It's a nice normal mouse pointer in the desktop workspace, but it turns into an hourglass instantly if I put it over the taskbar... but I am equally prohibited from clicking whether in the taskbar or in the desktop area. I can't click on ANYthing. Whoah! Finally, the "Configure Your Server" thing comes up! ...Or maybe not; it's only painted partway, with the frame and title bar but no contents. Well, I usually just ignore this thing anyway; I click the X, and I instantly get a "Program not responding" window. What you say! OK, get the damn thing out of my face. Now maybe I can run something, right...? Well, no, I can click now-- but double-clicking on anything, like the shortcut to the builds server or the "Connect to Internet" thing that never dies, with the big colorful gaudy mouse-pointer-in-supernova icon, results in an icon that blinks dark for a second and then goes back to normal. Nothing ever launches. I can bring up the Task Manager, but as far as it's concerned, I'm running no applications at all. Of course not! The only one that seemed to be loading wasn't responding. (No CPU activity or memory usage is reported either, just for your edification.)
Finally there's an error message, about two minutes after I double-clicked on it, that the link to the network resource (with the builds directory) can't be reached. Aha! No TCP/IP settings. Something must have gotten munged. My Network Places (what, "Network Neighborhood" was too grammatical or clearly stated for you?), Properties-- oh, a window with stuff in it. How special. I've always thought TCP/IP settings should be treated as files, you know? Gawd. Anyway.. wait. The only thing in this window is "Make New Connection". Aren't there, like, supposed to be other configurations...? Like for my LAN connection?
Well, let's click on "Make New Connection". Hmm... a wizard. it appears to be asking me for my modem information and ZIP code. No-ho-hooo, I'm not running my Win2K server on a dial-up. "Cancel", I say.
A dialog pops up. "Blah blah need phone information blah blah. Are you sure you want to cancel?" I have two buttons available, Yes and No. "Yes", I click. The dialog goes away... but the wizard doesn't. Um... I said, "Yes, I want to cancel." So I hit Cancel again. "Are you sure you want to cancel?" "YES!" The dialog cancels, the wizard sits there happily.
One more time! "CANCEL!" "Are you sure you want to cancel?" "FORTHELASTFUCKINGTIMEYESIWANTTOCANCEL!" ... and lo! The wizard quits!
(Try this on your own Windows 2000. It's really quite sensational. They've built in an internal counter to force you to say "Yes, I am sure I want to cancel" three times before it believes you and does what you say. "First you must answer me these questions three, ere the other side you see!" the grizzled wizard cackles. No, Microsoft knows what we really want. They have our best interests at heart. These are the people who will be controlling our credit cards in the very near future. Warms your heart, doesn't it?)
So anyway. I clearly have no viable option for entering my TCP/IP settings, on this machine which has so faithfully been running NT4 for the past three years. Does Windows 2000 Server ship without the software necessary to run on a LAN by default? Hmm, maybe I need to "Install Additional Networking Components," like it suggests so helpfully over on the left. Whoo, another wizard! three options. I pick "Additional Networking Services" or something that looks equally likely to be useful. It asks for the CD-- I yank it out of the apostrophe box and cram it in. It seems happy; it installs files. The progress bar gets to about 90%... and then a dialog: "You must have Microsoft IIS installed to add these components." And then an error dialog citing some incomprehensible hex number in parentheses.
By now I am visibly shaken. Okay, I am shrieking with rage. Oh, look! The checkbox says these Additional Networking Components (whatever the flying fuck they are) were actually installed, IIS or no IIS! But still no LAN settings to set. Well, hmm-- let's go into Add/Remove Hardware! I always love this; "I'd like to install a new sound card, please!" "Yessir!" And big robot arms come out of the floppy drive, pull a sound card out from behind my ear, and retract it into the box and install it with clunking and whirring sounds. Well, okay, that only happened once. And it didn't work this time, because as I was disappointed to see, about five of my devices had big yellow DANGER signs on them. And my Ethernet card icon was a big yellow question mark. Windows 2000 has never heard of my so-called "Intel EtherExpress Pro" or my "Intel PCI Bridge" or my "Creative SoundBlaster 16".
God, I'm sure glad we have this great, modern new OS to "upgrade" to, and to remove support for this shoddy, useless old hardware that nobody in the world uses.
So I abandon Mr. Server to its little mind games. I look back with furor at the apostrophe box. I use Lynx on the new server I'm building to pull up Google. A quick search on the terms "windows 2000 installation detection text screen apostrophe backquote ` god damn bill gates fucking piece of microsoft shit" turns up no useful results. So after noting with some despair that Robin had gone home some two hours before, and the rest of my team had followed suit, I looked up at the clock and decided that I would leave my useless driver-less server and my desktop machine with its screen that says
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and go the hell home.
Perhaps tomorrow will bring glorious insight and the resurrection of my machine with all its crucial data. Perhaps I will end up buying a new drive to install Win2K on and mount this drive on as a secondary, just like I had to when the Windows 98 installation botched my Windows 95 disk with its store of crucial data. In fact, the Win95 disk is still mounted in there. I foresee a pattern emerging here.
So in any case, for everybody for whom Windows 2000 is working really well, I'm really and truly glad to hear it. I don't know what it is you are able to do that makes the system acquiesce to your needs, but I clearly don't possess those faculties. I admire and applaud you. But mostly I'm just glad to be back home and away from Windows. For one more day.
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