Back Online: Toshiba Laptop Brought Back From Windows Update
June 14th, 2008 by joe
Yes, I am back, ready to kick more booty and take even yet more names.
Here’s what happened: Late Wednesday night, an automatic “Windows Update” of XP Professional kicked in while I was not looking, and rebooted my Toshiba A210 laptop. My computer automatically rebooted, and after that, the wireless adapter would not work.
I rebooted our wireless router, rebooted the computer, and still got zero connectivity. Up until this point, the Toshiba had been flawless since I bought it late last year.
Losing the wireless adapter would have been a huge problem because it is the only convenient way I can get online at home, and being forced to blog solely via my ethernet connection at work would have certainly reduced my participation here to little-old-lady levels, to say the least. I rarely begin to blog before 11:00 pm.
But the solution was a simple one, which I hold out as one which all of us poor stooges locked into Microsoft operating systems should be intimately aware of.
The trick is to bring your computer back to the previous “working” configuration.
On the Toshiba, this means right at startup (when you are presented with the option of pressing F2 for BIOS configuration) press F8, and choose “last known good configuration.” This will reverse the nefarious Windows update and bring your computer back to a working state. I had to move my “NETGEAR” home network back the top of the stack of “available wireless networks” and was back in business.
I suggest the next step is to find out how to turn off automatic Windows updates, and will post that whenever I figure it out. Whatever Microsoft purportedly assayed to accomplish with their forced update, I am going to bravely declare I will live without. Which I would love to be able to say about their whole company someday. But for now the lesson is, beware the automatic Windows update.
This entry was posted on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 at 1:27 am and is filed under Personal Stuff, Technology/Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 14th, 2008 at 2:01 am
Or, you could save up for a shiny new Macbook and give up these headaches once and for all..
June 14th, 2008 at 2:19 am
That goes without saying, my friend. The Mac, with its Unix operating system, is the best personal computer on Earth.
Unfortunately, in order to transition a functioning business to it, you would have to buy all new software - new licenses for Quark, MS Office and the various Adobe applications - which present a massive additional cost on top of the computers themselves.
June 14th, 2008 at 7:46 am
Dan, Joe,
Mac makes the best product on the market bar none. I want a MAc badly. The problem is my pocket book. I am instead going go the route of by Dell and installing some Linux variant. This way I get a bullet broof operating system at 1/2 the cost of a Mac. Yes, this route is NOT without peril.
Any thoughts?
June 14th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Yes, get the screen on your other laptop working, since it already has Linux on it. (Or did you ditch the beast?)
June 14th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
I had to do this a week ago for similar reasons.
June 14th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
I am fixing that beast. Actually a friend is. I am paying him for parts. It is a no brainer.
June 14th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
foolproof,
You what? Fixed a computer? Got a mac, or, installed LINUX? Try proper nouns, you are beginning to sound like a fortune cookie.
June 14th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
I think he is saying he had to do the same thing as me.
Linux with OpenOffice is a great way to go. I’ve only played with it on the desktop because as a practical matter the vast majority of computer time for me, even at home, is work-related, and to circulate documents it is just not efficient to stray from MS Office.
But OpenOffice is great and has supposedly gotten better the past two years. Download the gimp for photo processing. It is a little tricky but once you figure out the two or three things you need to do with it it’s easy. If I ever get a computer for primarily home use, and can’t afford a MAC, I’ll definitely use Linux.
We’ve been using it on our file server at work, and as the server for our Web site, since 2001 and have had exactly ZERO hiccups with either. That is, not one single time have we needed to “reboot the server”, which when we were running NT was a weekly occurrence.
June 14th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
Transitioning to Intel was the best decision Steve Jobs ever made. This made it possible to transfer your existing Windows software licenses to your Mac. I have several Windows apps that I run under XP on my Mac.
The Intel Macs can dual boot OS X or Windows. What I do as I don’t run many games, it to run virtual machines on my Mac. Using Parallels, I run OS X, XP,and Fedora under separate switchable screens. Quite impressive to be able to switch between the three.. Parallels cost me $75, well under the cost of new licenses. The other advantage to this is if I configure things correctly, The virtual machines cannot touch hard drive space outside of that assigned to it. Parallels also has what they call Coherence, which is Windows windows right next to OS X windows w/o any visual presence of the guest OS, this is also pretty cool. Parallels allowed be to reduce 3 computers onto one. Great product. Only wish I had save my OS2 Merlin install disks..
If you look at Linux, I would recommend the Ubunto distro. Very clean, and geared toward a more typical desktop user. Another alternative, is to download an ISO image for a Live CD Linux, to use when Windows is fubar, you just boot off of the CD and bring up Linux, This also lets you try a Linux distro w/o repartitioning your hard drive.
If you have any DOS programs kicking about, check out DOSEMU or FreeDOS.
Based upon my personal experiences, I still do not believe Linux is ready for primetime for other than a server or development environment. Does OpenOffice support Office 2008? More and more people are using this now, so remember this. Otherwise you will be p’ing and moaning when someone sends you a docx or xlsx file.
June 15th, 2008 at 2:13 am
Mac is the only system I will not buy. When desktop computers were selling for $1100 for decent systems, someone asked Jobs why they didn’t sell an $1100 Mac. His response permanently turned me off Macs “I could sell Macs for $1100 each, but when I can sell them for $2400, why should I?” When I heard that, I decided that I’d stick with OS/2 (back then) and never give a Mac the RFC-1305.
June 15th, 2008 at 8:15 am
But, Brian, that’s the capitalist way. If people are willing to pay an extra $1300 for cute and stable, so be it. I’m sure the Ritz doesn’t HAVE to charge $695 a night, but if people are willing to pay it for the prestige and service, why shouldn’t they? It’s not like it’s a monopoly where people don’t have choices. (Typing this from my beloved iBook.)
June 15th, 2008 at 8:42 am
I think you misinterpreted his repsonse, Brian. Apple was not making $1300 profit on each Mac. Rather, they chose to sell fewer superior machines, which are more expensive, rather than many inferior machines that are cheaper.
June 15th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Brian, yes that is why our office (and I imagine every office in America) is on PCs - Mac priced themselves out of the market permanently by keeping their prices so high in the early 1990s when American businesses were transitioning from a typewriter at every desk to a computer at every desk.
I think it was a huge strategic blunder, because it locked Apple into a permanent 10% share of the business market.
It lost them money, in the end, and it did us a disservice, because we are all stuck with lousy stinkin PCs.
Boy, did you say OS/2? Talk about poorly conceived ventures. I remember one of the magazine ads: “OS/2 made all of the software on my computer obsolete!”
Heh, and they wonder why it never caught on.
But now, Linda’s iBook was about $1100 a couple years ago, just a few hundred more than the Dell I owned and about 1000% more reliable when it came to wireless hookups. So Apple seems to have learned their lesson.
June 16th, 2008 at 2:40 am
OS/2 wasn’t poorly conceived, but it was horribly marketed. The fact that Microsoft had to share with IBM the profits for it doomed OS/2. Microsoft had all the rights to Windows, it didn’t make sense for them to produce anything for OS/2 when they would make more from Windows sales.
OS/2 was much more “Mac like” than Windows (everything in OS/2 was an object, and that made it much more robust than Windows). And it is near impossible to write real time processing in Windows (which was child’s play under OS/2).
Yeah, I wanted something better than Windows (and better than the Mac for that matter) that was easy to use (Linux is still for advanced users and developers). At this point, I keep hoping somebody will streamline the user experience for Linux and it will take a significant market share (30% would be great, and just about critical to have full commercial viability). Until someone does, Windows will own the desktop market.
June 16th, 2008 at 5:44 am
Dan,
When I was using Redhat ~2 years ago it could read all the Office files. The trouble was sometimes going the other way. I actually came to prefer ‘open Office’ apps to their official MS counterparts.
OS/2 was something I also experimented with years ago. The trouble was finding SW that would run on it. Shame it was IMO a good OS.
IMO there are some Linux flavors that ARE ready for ‘prime time’. Red Hat (Fedora?) is nearly their. I have NO experience with Ubuntu. Dan, as you are more Computer savvy than most, could you explain to all the neophytes (myself included) the meaning of a clean install and what are the differences between the different Linux flavors?
June 16th, 2008 at 8:07 am
Jacob,
Wasn’t your (much) better half an OS/2 guru (gurette?) back in the day?
June 16th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
OS/2 was a great product, unfortunately, it was born of a rift between MSFT and IBM, and it seemed to be IBM’s unloved stepchild.
Personally I believe IBM’s major mistake was not to put it in the public domain once they decided they were not moving forward with. I believe that if they had, Linux would be little more than an unusual name..
Jacob, Linux is a kernel, the very heart of the system, kind of like the engine in your car so to speak. What differentiates the various Linux based products, distributions, or “distros”, is the rest of the stuff that makes a desktop computer a desktop computer. The car body, upholstery, tires etc, of my car analogy. Various window managers are in use, each with their own unique look-and-feel. Most of the productivity software is the same, Mozilla and OpenOffice is used many if not all of the more common Linux distros.
I use Fedora Core Linux at home only to mirror software development tools that I use at work for those times when it is necessary to burn a little midnight oil. Otherwise I would not use it, the primary reason being is that I view my computer as a toaster. To me it is an appliance, and not a hobby. I went through all that with my first computer, a Heathkit running CPM 2.2.0. It was a great machine that had a ripping 2 megahertz Z80, and a jaw dropping 64k of RAM, coupled with a hires Hercules graphics card, an amber monitor, and a 300 baud dial up modem. Very sweet setup for the time. In those days, there was no Internet, so if you had a problem, you had to find it and patch it yourself. Probably can’t count the number of cigarettes burned while pouring over CPM bios listings. So Linux is kind of a been-here-done-that thing for me.
June 16th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
..are you in here? Oh, sorry. I was chasing a ghost in the machine (I think it was lawnmower man) and I ended up on this nerd thread. Am I stuck in a loop? Will I ever see reality again? Is there life after OS/2 and is it traitorist to work on a Mac? These are the nagging questions everyone wants to know….except me. Okay, okay, I’m leaving already!
June 16th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Brian, yes, early on Jobs did not appreciate the value of market share, niether did Scully. Now that Jobs is older and wiser, he seems to have abandoned the folly of youth. Yes, a Mac is more expensive than many Dells, for the same reason a BMW costs more than a Cobalt. Once you start to look at the details, the initial cost benefit vanishes, particularly when you put a price tag on your time.
Some time ago, an acquaintance told me a story where he, and a friend spent all day Saturday scouring the Internet for drivers for his new Verizon wireless card, which was advertised as Windows only. After 8 hours or so, they finally got it working. On a lark, he popped the wireless card into his friends Powerbook, and within 10 minutes, they were logged into the network. This is the essence of the Mac experience. Your computer should work for you, not the other way around. As BMW and now Apple have figured out, it is all about the experience using their products.
Jacob, sorry, missed the clean install bit. Being basically a lazy individual I rarely, if ever do a clean install, unless I absolutely have to. I also have a philosophical feeling that it is the software vendors job to ensure their software installs cleanly, not mine. Never have encountered any problems using this approach. For those that don’t know what a clean install is, it is basically wiping your hard drive clean before installing a new OS.
Safe harbor statement - don’t do a clean install without verified backups of your data !
June 16th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
I have no idea what you people are talking about.
F2 ! Such language