Kiran Jonnalagadda (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jace) wrote,@ 2006-02-08 10:43:00 |
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Adventures in Microsoft-world
This week I made another foray into Microsoft-world and came away less assured of their ability to design usable interfaces.
I wanted to download the Windows XP Embedded developer kit. It came as one of those funky web downloaders—where you download a small program, which in turn downloads and installs the main components. This is where the hoopla began.
(Screenshot taken later; explanation below.)
First strike: what’s with a specialised downloader? My regular downloading tools do the job great, even with multi gigabyte files. They’ll slice and dice and query for faster mirrors and whatnot. They’ll even work across platforms. All they want is a URL. Spare us the feeble, platform specific, fault intolerant downloaders, please.
Anyway, I let it run. After a while, wanting to make other use of the desktop as the download progressed, I minimised the window… and it disappeared! Gone. No longer in the taskbar. Not in the tray. What kind of idiotic app design mandates a silent exit on being minimised? So I relaunched it—at which it resumed downloading like nothing had happened (thank goodness for small mercies)—minimised it, and it was gone again. The behaviour was consistent.
A few relaunches later, I noticed a growing collection of icons in the tray:
Well, what do I know? It was minimising to the tray after all, but hiding itself in the unused icons portion. Evidently, it was neither smart enough to recognise being relaunched nor polite enough to tell me where it was hiding.
The download took all day. I left the machine running and went home. The next day I was greeted by two dialogs. One said the download was complete. Great! The other said I had to reboot to complete the installation. I rebooted.
Then I looked expectantly at the Start Menu, and there was nothing there. I looked in the download folder, and some of the files were missing. Of the 800-odd MB downloaded, only 117 megs were in the folder. The rest of the files were… gone! I looked in the Recycle Bin. Nothing there. I looked in all the user folders. Not there either. I looked in all the Temp folders. Nada. The files were gone, just like that!
Bah! So I ran the installer again and it took another full day. Every couple of hours, I made a backup of the download folder, determined to not let it sweep them out from beneath me again. I stayed late waiting for the finale. When it came, it didn’t ask me to reboot. It launched a welcome screen instead.
Huh? I quickly opened the download folder, and the files were gone again! So where was the welcome screen running from? I looked at the Task Manager. It said it was a SETUP.EXE, but wouldn’t tell me what folder it was located in. I searched for all files with that name and discovered this:
In each of these folders was a SETUP.EXE. The one currently running was from DISK1. Wait a minute. Did this mean the downloader had done the same thing yesterday? Finish downloading and move everything to an undisclosed location? I had lost an entire day downloading files I already had because the stupid effing downloader had failed to notify me of where it moved the files before rebooting?
Anyway, that welcome screen:
Huh? What’s this? I downloaded only a service pack? Where’s the main deal? If this is it, where’s the installer? Much perplexity later, I learnt this was indeed the full XP Embedded installer, despite what the text suggested, and I had to click on all the labels reading "Setup", one after the other, top to bottom. Any other way and they’d have dependency issues. Each of those items had a different sort of installer. Some only displayed a progress dialog as they extracted something and then exited silently. Some had those Wizard style installers.
When they were done, I closed the Welcome screen and opened the one in DISK2. It turned out to be exactly the same as the one in DISK1. Exactly the same. The one in disk3 was different. It carried Service Pack 2 updates to the previous disks. The Database Update program whined it could not connect to the database service.
Huh? What database? Didn’t the first installer install some sort of database? A look at the list of available services revealed that there was a desktop edition of SQL Server freshly installed and configured to start at startup, but not currently running. I started it and went back to the installer, which spent ten minutes busy with something before whining that it did not have write access to delete something-SP2-something from the database and was therefore going to die on me. A second try and the same result.
So what we have here is Installer Part 1 installs something but leaves its configuration in a state such that Installer Part 2 cannot proceed.
In writing this post, I opened the downloader again to make a screenshot and it recognised that XPe SP2 was partially installed. So the downloader is smart enough to recognise a partial install, but not smart enough to realise it has already downloaded all this. And this is a downloader, not an installer.
Hey Microsoft, way to go!
This week I made another foray into Microsoft-world and came away less assured of their ability to design usable interfaces.
I wanted to download the Windows XP Embedded developer kit. It came as one of those funky web downloaders—where you download a small program, which in turn downloads and installs the main components. This is where the hoopla began.
(Screenshot taken later; explanation below.)
First strike: what’s with a specialised downloader? My regular downloading tools do the job great, even with multi gigabyte files. They’ll slice and dice and query for faster mirrors and whatnot. They’ll even work across platforms. All they want is a URL. Spare us the feeble, platform specific, fault intolerant downloaders, please.
Anyway, I let it run. After a while, wanting to make other use of the desktop as the download progressed, I minimised the window… and it disappeared! Gone. No longer in the taskbar. Not in the tray. What kind of idiotic app design mandates a silent exit on being minimised? So I relaunched it—at which it resumed downloading like nothing had happened (thank goodness for small mercies)—minimised it, and it was gone again. The behaviour was consistent.
A few relaunches later, I noticed a growing collection of icons in the tray:
Well, what do I know? It was minimising to the tray after all, but hiding itself in the unused icons portion. Evidently, it was neither smart enough to recognise being relaunched nor polite enough to tell me where it was hiding.
The download took all day. I left the machine running and went home. The next day I was greeted by two dialogs. One said the download was complete. Great! The other said I had to reboot to complete the installation. I rebooted.
Then I looked expectantly at the Start Menu, and there was nothing there. I looked in the download folder, and some of the files were missing. Of the 800-odd MB downloaded, only 117 megs were in the folder. The rest of the files were… gone! I looked in the Recycle Bin. Nothing there. I looked in all the user folders. Not there either. I looked in all the Temp folders. Nada. The files were gone, just like that!
Bah! So I ran the installer again and it took another full day. Every couple of hours, I made a backup of the download folder, determined to not let it sweep them out from beneath me again. I stayed late waiting for the finale. When it came, it didn’t ask me to reboot. It launched a welcome screen instead.
Huh? I quickly opened the download folder, and the files were gone again! So where was the welcome screen running from? I looked at the Task Manager. It said it was a SETUP.EXE, but wouldn’t tell me what folder it was located in. I searched for all files with that name and discovered this:
In each of these folders was a SETUP.EXE. The one currently running was from DISK1. Wait a minute. Did this mean the downloader had done the same thing yesterday? Finish downloading and move everything to an undisclosed location? I had lost an entire day downloading files I already had because the stupid effing downloader had failed to notify me of where it moved the files before rebooting?
Anyway, that welcome screen:
Huh? What’s this? I downloaded only a service pack? Where’s the main deal? If this is it, where’s the installer? Much perplexity later, I learnt this was indeed the full XP Embedded installer, despite what the text suggested, and I had to click on all the labels reading "Setup", one after the other, top to bottom. Any other way and they’d have dependency issues. Each of those items had a different sort of installer. Some only displayed a progress dialog as they extracted something and then exited silently. Some had those Wizard style installers.
When they were done, I closed the Welcome screen and opened the one in DISK2. It turned out to be exactly the same as the one in DISK1. Exactly the same. The one in disk3 was different. It carried Service Pack 2 updates to the previous disks. The Database Update program whined it could not connect to the database service.
Huh? What database? Didn’t the first installer install some sort of database? A look at the list of available services revealed that there was a desktop edition of SQL Server freshly installed and configured to start at startup, but not currently running. I started it and went back to the installer, which spent ten minutes busy with something before whining that it did not have write access to delete something-SP2-something from the database and was therefore going to die on me. A second try and the same result.
So what we have here is Installer Part 1 installs something but leaves its configuration in a state such that Installer Part 2 cannot proceed.
In writing this post, I opened the downloader again to make a screenshot and it recognised that XPe SP2 was partially installed. So the downloader is smart enough to recognise a partial install, but not smart enough to realise it has already downloaded all this. And this is a downloader, not an installer.
Hey Microsoft, way to go!
