HEALTH WARNING

Dick Pountain/16 Apr 2000/Idealog 69

There may be some activity that I like less than installing a new operating system, but I can't immediately think what it is. I suppose I owe it to you to try however, so how about - being chased through the third circle of Hell by a pack of rabid and leprous hyenas, while wearing huge luminous yellow trainers filled with drawing pins. You may have gathered from this that I've just had to upgrade my OS (not to Windows 2000, but merely to NT 4.0, in keeping with my habit of staying safely behind the bleeding edge). I just checked my archives to see when I last wrote about this subject and it turns out to be in October 1994, which means that I've been running Windows 95 continuously, and moderately happily, for almost six years. I had achieved a more or less stable configuration that required rebooting no more frequently than once a week, and where everything worked the way I liked it. The curse of Gates decreed that something had to give.

I upgraded to NT4 because I've been saddled with a piece of mission-critical software that only runs reliably under that OS (don't even ask) and which crashes from resource shortage under 95 or 98, but I'd already made the decision to get new hardware to run NT on. Before I could get that however, events transpired that forced me to reinstall Windows 95 on my old machine too, so I faced two installs in the same week after six years of relative sanity. My Windows 95 machine developed a permanent resource leak - which manifested itself through the little icons in the taskbar and window control menus going black - and no amount of removing utilities from my startup directory could locate the culprit. Finally in a fit of fatal impatience I restored a 'known good' (ha, ha) registry backup. That's when my Internet connection stopped working. What happened was that in the ensuing turmoil I uninstalled AOL 5, which contrary to the bad press it's received had been working perfectly well for me, and reinstalled AOL 4 to see if that made any difference. Bad move - DLLs shot, name resolution no longer works, reinstalling didn't help. Things spiralled downhill from there until, after a consultation with our own Mr Cassidy, I decided that a complete reinstall of Windows was the only way back.

As an aside, I've been using AOL as my ISP for all those six years simply because I find it more convenient than faffing about with free ISPs and dial-up networking. It's perfectly adequate in performance (in fact to US sites it has a fatter pipe than many UK outfits) and you can log on from just about anywhere in the world. I don't use any of its proprietory content, chatrooms or stuff, nor do I use its built-in browser: I just launch the AOL client as my socket, then run Opera, or a news reader, or even telnet into Cix over the top of it.

 During the install I soon discovered just how many little programs and utilities I'd come to depend on during those six years. Being a fairly organized sort of person I did have all the installation files for them, which I keep on a separate Zip disk called Prog Files against exactly such a day. I'd even kept the registration keys for them all, but it still took me best part of three days to get everything in my setup back working. For many of the more complex applications nowadays (eg. web browsers) the order in which you install them matters, and though I've tried using systems like Windelete or Cleansweep, in the end the complexity defeats them all. Then there are all those installation Wizards, which when they work make life easier, but if they stall halfway through leave you swinging in the breeze with a system that's in a unknown and possibly broken state. My conclusion at the end of it all - confirmed by all my RWC colleagues - is that the only possible way to safely restore a Microsoft operating system configuration nowadays is by copying a bit-by-bit disk image taken using something like Ghost back onto a freshly formatted disk. However with the entry-level size for PC hard disks now reaching around 12 Gbytes, you really need a server with terabytes of disk and a 100 Mbit Ethernet connection just to keep adequate backups. Non-networked single users like me have finally been hunted to extinction: I intend to set up my old machine as an NT server with a 12 Gbyte disk, simply to archive my working machine.

The experience of reinstalling Windows after all this time just reinforces my feeling that this industry has run completely off the rails, and not from evil intentions or greed as some would have it, but due to simple over-enthusiasm and shortsightedness. By loading too many functions onto an already fatally compromised OS design, we've become trapped into a vicious spiral where the new measures needed to restore manageability merely make the complexity and unmanageability worse. Where once computers seemed to me like reason made solid, they now look far more like unreason in a box - unpredictable and beyond the comprehension of even expert users. Where once a computer looked like an amplifier for the mind, I now realise that it's just as capable of amplifying anxiety as creativity. It's chastening and humiliating to reflect that while so many people all over the world have to worry about food, or shelter, or disease, or ethnic cleansing, probably the biggest source of anxiety in my life is now my computer.