I took on the job of creating a DVD of this year's choir concert. I used my Canon Vixia HF20 HD (1080i) camera to record the video and sound and frankly, it did a great job. Now came the hard part.
Another day lost. As many times as I’ve helped others get connected, nothing worked today as I tried to connect from one system in a Workgroup to a SQL Server on a local (trusted) domain. I tried everything imaginable including:
Nothing made any difference. I could not connect from other domain-based systems either. The rest of the story? Well, I remembered having installed Windows 7 on top of an existing Windows Vista system. I had assumed that it had joined the SBS domain correctly (I ran “Connect” which was supposed to do that). Apparently it didn’t. When I dropped the offending system from the domain, went into SBS, dropped the system there, and rejoined the domain it worked fine. Everyone could see the SQL Server. That only took 6 hours of fiddling to figure out. I’m hesitant to run connect again…
Sigh. How does anyone get any work done if all we do is frutz with systems?
Bill
After updating a working Vista system to Windows 7 several things happened that made what seemed like an easy transition to Windows 7 from Vista less than productive. I detail these issues to help you avoid the same issues. Yes, Windows 7 is worth the pain. It’s noticeably faster at every step, the UI is different but I get it. It’s more secure, but that’s a PIA sometimes—and that’s not a Primary Interop Assembly.
Patrick, I could not agree more with your editorial this month. Based on what I hear when I leave my cave is that Microsoft just doesn’t get it. Because of politics (no, not the Bush/Obama kind) and an old-school marketing and sales plan, Microsoft has also forced its own development teams to pump out new versions of SQL Server and other serious platform engines on a ever-shortening cycle. The same is true for Visual Studio and the languages teams whose development cycles seem to be totally consumed trying to get the Entity Framework working. This means the teams place less emphasis on fixing existing long-term bugs and making development of existing architectures easier. Over and over again we hear that “Microsoft knows what’s best for developers”.
When the daily Vista backup failed, I expected it was time to throw out some of the older backups and make sure there was room on the backup drive for more—after all it’s only 750GB. Well about this time my system failed to boot. No amount of cajoling or trickery could get it to boot. Safe mode? Nope—blue screen that flashed by so fast I couldn’t read it. So I tried to use the backups that did exist on the drive to restore the system. The Vista Setup disk could not see them. I tore the system down (about midnight) and pulled the drive, tested it (it was fine) mounted it in a USB carrier and told Vista to look for it. No joy. I attached the drive and shared it to the network and told Vista to attach to the network (which it did) and look for the files. Not found.
As a result, I had to totally reinstall the OS. What a PITA. I’ll spend every non-working hour for weeks trying to get this (my primary dev system) back to 100%. Hell, the Windows updates alone take 36 hours to install…
I’m installing Acronis Workstation now and backing up the system so I can REALLY restore it when stuff happens—as it always does.
I just hope V7 works better than this…
ttyl
While at PASS I had a chance to ask questions about Windows Server 2008. You see I tried to back up my server using the built-in Windows Server Backup (WSB) program. Ah, it's pretty crude. Interestingly enough, very (very) few of the Microsoft folks at the booths knew of the (gross) limitations of the backup implementation. The third-party companies that sell backup solutions were also clueless.
How many times have you opened a directory in Vista only to discover it's being shown using the wrong display format? For example, you might want to just browse the files in "Details" format or see that set of pictures you took at Aunt Bessie's party in "icon" format. Well, did you know that if you hold down the Ctrl key and use the mouse wheel that the View changes? I didn't until today when I did it by accident. Of course, it might be nice if Vista would actually friggen remember the view I assigned on my last visit, but this is far better than having a random view show up and having to mouse around to select the right view...
I hope this helps.
Bill
