Ashtead's Journal: vista filter nonsense

As I may or may not have mentioned, I have a friend and her daughter living here for a while, before they find another place to stay. Now, she bought a new portable PC this fall, an ACER and this runs Windows Vista.

One early problem was that the DVD-drive, which also handles CDs didn't work right out of the box. I googled this, and found the fix was removing some strings from the Registry.

Now she installed Nero 8, and the drive went MIA again -- presumably the same problem, and the same fix. Which I'll record here, so as to be able to find it again. Rant will follow. Kudos to someone, name of Ryan for this. The recipe is as follows:

Go into the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CURRENTCONTROLSET/Control/Class/ then 4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318 and wipe out any string-values named Upperfilter and Lowerfilter as these may exist.

So I did this, and lo and behold, the disk drive came back into view. So far so good.

However, since I use Linux on most of the machines here, I haven't had any problems with the disk drives disappearing like this at all. Neither do I have to install anything like Nero for burning disks either, it just works right away.

How come windows-depemdent people even think this is supposed to be the normal way of the world, that things won't work until finer surgery is done on them? No car buyer would accept that, in order to open the trunk, you'd have to disconnect certain wires under the hood.

Whatever happened to fitness for purpose? Even if not having certified the system for use in situations where life or limb is in jeopardy, one does have a reasonable expectation of things at least appearing to work right! Never mind EULAs and legal weasel-wording, if it is broke on delivery that is bad P.R. My friend is on the verge of writing an angry letter to Bill Gates, and ask him what kind of rubbish his company is pushing.

What are these filter-things supposed to be for anyway? Since things actually work when they are removed? They worked fine until Nero put them back in, then I had to look up the Martian phone number for the fix again. The last part of that number looks like a MAC address, and I noticed it was the first of a series of entries, where only the first set of digits were different. So the GUID becomes something else to ponder, but what is going on in there. Unfortunately there is no source code, so I can't have a look....

summary

[Bill Dog]

An acquaintance got a new laptop, from Acer. Acer chose to load it with Windows Vista, even though it is well known that Vista is having significant compatibility issues. One of them being that the laptop's optical drive doesn't work, as shipped. Yet Acer shipped it out in this configuration anyways.

Therefore, it's Microsoft's fault. Bill Gates should be held personally responsible for this laptop's condition, and why on earth can't MS see the good sense in giving away for absolutely nothing their entire, e

Nobody in our profession...

[jawtheshark]

... finds it even remotely acceptable. So, even the Windowsheads don't find this acceptable. The only problem is that we do not buy Vista from Microsoft. We get it from the OEMs, who could be in error too. So they are the scapegoat, not Microsoft.

Actually, I find that, when doing a clean install (never done Vista though), you get a very clean system where you can install the minimal amount of drivers. Then you lock it down (everyone really is a Limited User, except for the Administrator account). Aft