Call Me Windows, Call Me Nuts!

Let me first state that I'm impressed and generally satisfied with my Windows 7 64-bit experience. It is indeed a much better operating system than we've seen from Microsoft since DOS....

Now that the honeymoon is over, I see some of the same unstable behaviors of Windows past. I'm convinced Windows has multiple personality disorder. Has the constant inbreeding finally caught up? (All in good fun, folks)!

• A little over a week ago after a reboot forced by an OS update, my media card reader went belly up. The infamous error 43. Though it is well discussed in forum after forum, I was unable to solve this problem. I spent over two hours working through solutions found on forums and Microsoft's support site. No joy. I had accepted the fact that the 7 media card reader built into my PC had been rendered useless and that I would have to purchase an external reader and burn another USB port. Hold on this this thought...
• About 3 or 4 weeks ago my system experienced grey screens of death. Nothing on the screen but a dark grey color and no response from the system. The only solution was a hard off and reboot. This problem only happened twice during a week period.
• About 3 or 4 weeks ago I started experiencing a problem where my network connections would fail after about 3 days of uptime. Disabling or diagnosing the network adapter would not revive connections. Even command line updates to the connections were of no use. A reboot was always required to clear up the problem. 
• This morning the network connection issue occurred and I restarted Windows. Well, I tried to restart - it hung shutting down. I was patient, waited 10 minutes, then did a hard kill. Here is the crazy part.... while it was booting Windows now decided "hey, you have a media reader. let me install device drivers for that"! So after almost 2 weeks of having a disabled media reader Windows has decided that it might be a device that was important to me. I plugged in a media card and, holy cow, it worked!

The media card issue is puzzling since it had been working for months in Windows 7. I can't say it was a MS problem but the USB device stopped working after a recent Windows update. During the time it was disabled, I've booted 6 or 7 times but it was not until this morning during a failed shutdown, hard kill, and reboot that Windows 7 decided to reinstall drivers.

If I acted this way around friends, family, and colleagues they would have me locked up for being nuts and rightly so. As a developer, I understand the complexity of the systems we work on but these behaviors puzzle me. Especially the inconsistency of it all. Again, I'm relatively happy with Windows 7. The types of applications I run are wonderful under a 64-bit OS.

When you're around nuts it is best to grin, bear it, and enjoy the ride.

(photo by Pink Sherbet Photography)