Originally posted by NickFitz
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Back in 2000 I'd bought a new motherboard and an AMD K6-2 (was it?) processor - 500MHz, or something glitzy like that. New hard drive as well.
This was when I'd just moved to Cheltenham, and the strange yet beautiful woman for whom I had moved didn't have a phone line in her flat, and I hadn't yet had one installed.
Having carefully built my new PC I installed Windows 95 on it but it wouldn't boot. Rebooting in the "spew stuff onto the console so I can see where you fail" mode, it was apparent that a certain DLL was failing during the boot sequence.
So I trogged off to the Internet Café above the second-hand bookshop in the next street.
Bingo! A Microsoft Knowledge Base article about Win95 failing on such processors running above 350 MHz, but there was a patch available, which one could run from a floppy.
Having eagerly downloaded said patch, I scampered back to the flat, booted into DOS, and then attempted to run the patching application.
It said "This application will only run under Windows".
Given that "this application" was a patch for a fault that prevented Windows from booting, I found this less than helpful
In fact, I did this:
I then extracted the motherboard from the machine, reset the jumpers on the motherboard to clock the processor at 256 MHz, put it back in and connected everything, booted successfully into Win95, ran the patch from there, took the motherboard out again, switched the jumpers back to get the processor running at its intended speed, put the motherboard back in the machine, reconnected everything again, and it finally worked.
It was only once it was all working that I looked at the patch application that would "only run under Windows".
It copied two DLL files over flawed versions thereof - a task that could be done with MS-DOS 2.0 in the early Eighties (not 1.0, as that didn't support hierarchical directories).
This was the precise moment that I knew - knew, with absolute certainty - that, whatever they may have done for the microcomputer industry in the late Seventies and early-to-mid Eighties, I now hated Microsoft with an absolute vengeance. For that is the moment that I knew, without any shadow of a doubt, that whatever they may once have been, they were now a purveyor of shoddy goods, staffed by incompetent fools.
Any company that provides a fix for the "Our product won't run" problem yet requires the product to be running for the fix to work has lost sight of something important. In this case, the bleeding obvious.
This was when I'd just moved to Cheltenham, and the strange yet beautiful woman for whom I had moved didn't have a phone line in her flat, and I hadn't yet had one installed.
Having carefully built my new PC I installed Windows 95 on it but it wouldn't boot. Rebooting in the "spew stuff onto the console so I can see where you fail" mode, it was apparent that a certain DLL was failing during the boot sequence.
So I trogged off to the Internet Café above the second-hand bookshop in the next street.
Bingo! A Microsoft Knowledge Base article about Win95 failing on such processors running above 350 MHz, but there was a patch available, which one could run from a floppy.
Having eagerly downloaded said patch, I scampered back to the flat, booted into DOS, and then attempted to run the patching application.
It said "This application will only run under Windows".
Given that "this application" was a patch for a fault that prevented Windows from booting, I found this less than helpful
In fact, I did this:
I then extracted the motherboard from the machine, reset the jumpers on the motherboard to clock the processor at 256 MHz, put it back in and connected everything, booted successfully into Win95, ran the patch from there, took the motherboard out again, switched the jumpers back to get the processor running at its intended speed, put the motherboard back in the machine, reconnected everything again, and it finally worked.
It was only once it was all working that I looked at the patch application that would "only run under Windows".
It copied two DLL files over flawed versions thereof - a task that could be done with MS-DOS 2.0 in the early Eighties (not 1.0, as that didn't support hierarchical directories).
This was the precise moment that I knew - knew, with absolute certainty - that, whatever they may have done for the microcomputer industry in the late Seventies and early-to-mid Eighties, I now hated Microsoft with an absolute vengeance. For that is the moment that I knew, without any shadow of a doubt, that whatever they may once have been, they were now a purveyor of shoddy goods, staffed by incompetent fools.
Any company that provides a fix for the "Our product won't run" problem yet requires the product to be running for the fix to work has lost sight of something important. In this case, the bleeding obvious.
top techie post
Don't say that BP is going on his hols there soon....
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