Re: OT: Win 7 comments

Daniel Johnson stated in post SK-dncHJhvn7qWbXnZ2dnUVZ_sudnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
on 11/11/09 3:02 PM:


That's not true. You can't predict what an application will try to do to one
of these dialogs. They can get at the controls inside and alter then or read
their state. Nearly any change will break an app that does so.

If so, then that is a huge weakness of Windows. With OS X, Apple has been
able to change common dialogs, color selectors, etc. and break nothing... or
break very, very little.

Apple has been pretty conservative about changes, actually. But MS's attention
to compatibility is one of the big strengths of Windows.

I do not know a single app which has broken because the OS supplied Print
dialog changed its *looks*. Really, I cannot imagine why this would break
any app.

[snip]
But yeah, it's a bit cheap to compare the *entire* registry to just a
fraction of the plists on your system.

The registry is a monolithic whole.

You know better than this. I don't think there's a need to discuss it further
after this.

Ok, it is a few files... but the UI to work with it deals with it as a
monolithic whole.

[snip]
I find this... strange. Aren't Macs all about the UI? Aren't they supposed
to have a good user experience? And yet you traditionally turn to the
command line when you could use the plist editor?

I admit, I find it odd as well... but every time I see an Apple article
suggesting one change a plist, that is the suggested method. Also true of
MacOSXHints and the like.

Yes, I know. I just wonder how that happened. Remember when Mac OS didn't even
have a command line at all?

Yes... and I wanted it to. :)

But, sure, the average customer should not have to ever touch the command
line. This might be a place where they *sometimes* are directed to do so.

[snip]
But that is where they are stored.

Yes, mostly. After all, what's not to like about ridiculous overkill?

It would make more sense to have a folder filled with INI files... maybe, to
be more standard, in XML format and, for efficiency, in a binary format that
can be converted to text. Wish some OS would do that. :)

No. Windows went there in the 3.x days. Nobody wants that back.

Why not? No more "ridiculous overkill"

[snip]
Oh, God, car analogies. But this one is not entirely off base. Suppose your
car is making funny noises. Do you then replace a tire? Or maybe all tires?

Turn the radio up louder. :)

Exactly! :D

I had an old car that I took to the mechanic... he told me that was my best
course of action until I got a new car. Also had an axel that was going
bad... he told me it was vehicular arthritis and that if the car complained
of pain to just put an aspirin in the gas tank.

Wonder what would have happened had I done so. :)

If you do not know where the noise is coming from, of course, you need to
track that down. I am not against troubleshooting, you know. :)

I dislike these "quick fix" procedures partly because they discourage
troubleshooting. They are a one-size-fits-all solution. No thinking
required.

Well, I do not suggest it for all problems! So no one-size-fits-all
solution here.

Lest you get the wrong idea, I should just say that this kind of thing is
simply endemic on Windows. Nobody wants to think. It's all quick fixes,
snake oil, and of course, blaming Microsoft. :(

Bill Gates personally. He did it. To my system. The jerk.

[snip]
This is not "specific terms". Why didn't the program open? If something was
wrong with the preferences, what was it?

No clue. I have, in the past, opened the prefs to see if I can see anything
out of whack. Even kept the old one and compared... never found anything
significant that would cause the problem.

This strongly suggests that the plist was not corrupted, and that the symptom
vanished for some other reason. Like, maybe just restarting the program did
it.

Nope... this is after a recurring problem. Toss the prefs and life is good.
Look at prefs - see nothing out of whack. Scratch head... decide if it is
worth it to do more. Decide not... go on with life.

If a corrupted preferences file will stop a program opening, that is really
grievously crap. There's no excuse for that. And when I used the Mac, I
never saw it happen. Maybe I overestimated the quality of Mac apps, or of
the plist implementation, but I thought it adequately robust at the time.

I have seen that happen from time to time. That and programs acting "wonky"
or crashing. Most app developers will suggest you toss the pref file.

"Wonky" and crashing I have seen. But I only found once case of a genuinely
bad prefs file.

That was XCode, which had written incorrect values for the positions of its
panes. It didn't validate or anything, and these errors caused cosmetic
glitches. Deleting the specific preferences with incorrect values caused the
problem to abate- temporarily. It's been awhile, but I think the next
release of XCode fixed the bug.

I've never seen a Windows app do that, though there's no technical reason
why they could not. It's just not real common on either system.

I have seen apps on Windows have their windows off screen. Used to be able
to replicate it with, I think, Notepad. That was in the days of XP before
SP1. Might be long since corrected.

For what it is worth, I could get it back with the menu methods of moving
windows - no need to fiddle with the registry.

[snip]
But I know what you mean. Sometimes it is hard to reproduce an issue. I, as
a rule, cannot troubleshoot anything I cannot reproduce. So first, I must
find a way to reproduce it. This may involve experimentation. It is
important not to suppress the symptoms until this is done!

Why? If you have a quick fix that is likely to make the problem go away, why
spend the extra time?

Because you do not have such a quick fix.

Experience shows me otherwise. And lots of suggestions from lots of sites.
Again, read the ScreenFlow forum... they suggest such things often and have
people report back success.

I will say, I do sometimes look at various logs to see if I can glean
anything of value.

This can be a useful step, too.

Only sometimes. Generally I have no clue what most of it means. :)

Even have the "CrashReporter" log folder aliased on my desktop.

Wow. You crash that much?

On 10.6.0 and stock 10.6.1 I did. Yeah. Bummer.

I had Firefox crash last night - pretty much ignored it. If it keeps
happening, though, I will look at the logs and also try to see if there is a
pattern. Likely a Flash problem - happened when I was on Hulu.

Yeah, sometimes you get programs that just really buggy, and I understand
that the Mac version of Flash is kind of dodgy. What you want to do is
replace the bad software with something better.

Silverlight, anyone? :D

Hulu does not work with that. Maybe they will move to the HTML5 video
stuff. I hope things go that way. No more Flash!

[snip]
No, I haven't. I've heard of it. But blaming things of this kind of the
registry is silly. These kinds of instructions have to exist, and you will
have the same problems if they are wrong no matter how they are stored.

True... I never see this on OS X. I see it often with XP. We shall see with
Win 7.

If you are seeing it often with XP, you are doing something fairly awful to
your XP system: removing programs via Window Explorer, perhaps. Or installing
something pretty nasty.

I see this on customer computers. I doubt they are deleting things that
way. They might be getting tricked into installing who-knows-what... though
I see it on systems where I find no "nasties". I have never seen it on my
own systems over the years... at least not that I recall off hand.

One difference is the common practices of the apps on the platform... on
Windows, many programs add little things to start up on boot. It is really
quite annoying... and the general user has no way to get rid of the things.

I note that if *these* registry entries refer to missing files you performance
will *increase*. :D

If you resolve the issue... right.

You can use msconfig or a third party utility, or you can dig through the
registry... one list I was able to dig up of where (from forensicfocus,
need account to view):

-HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Runonce
-HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\Explorer\Run
-HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
-HKCU\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Windows\Run
-HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
-HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
-(ProfilePath)\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

This is is why you want msconfig, of course. :D

I use Glary Utilities or, sometimes, Spybot S&D... same idea, though.

Ouch. That was compared to, for OS X:

/user/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginitems.plist

This is definitely not he complete list on OS X.

Well, it is what was listed on Forensics Focus. :)

However, Windows does have self-repair mechanisms that can correct these
problems - sometimes. These work by detecting and replacing missing
components, so in the case you describe, Windows would fix the problem by
reinstalling the missing files, not by changing the registry at all.

Yesterday just ran a reg "fixer".... here is what it found on my Win 7
installation:

Ok. It appears this one is pretty lousy. To summarize the findings:

It found some 21 empty keys. These do nothing and are harmless.

It found 7 keys that refer to missing items in the registry. These are
harmless, though they may impose a very tiny performance hit if anyone tries
to use them.

It found that 4 recent file list entries referred to files that were not
there. This is harmless and expected.

It found 24 file extensions mapped to missing programs or classes. Some of
these are very strange; it seems to think 32-bit WMP is missing, for one
thing. I suspect it may be incorrect: all the missing programs have command
line switches. Maybe it did not detect these, or remove them before checking
the path.

It also found 5 context menu items that refer to missing files- mostly
windows media player again. Again, maybe the command line switches are
throwing it off.

It found 1 missing help file. I hope you didn't need help on whatever that
file was about.

It seems to have flagged the (blank) default value of the local machine
"Run" key as an invalid path. It's not an invalid path; it's just blank
because it is not used.

It has flagged the AppDataLow key as empty and says it "can be deleted". *Do
not* delete this key; It contains no sub-keys or values, but it has an ACL
with an integrity level setting to let sandboxed programs use it. If you did
delete it, I can only hope the auto-repair mechanism will restore it, but I
am not sure it will. If not, some plug-ins may fail to run in the IE
protected mode sandbox.

So, overall, I think this registry fixer is not a winner. Most of the stuff
it flags it harmless but useless; I think it may be misdiagnosing some of
the 'missing files'.

And if it actually does remove AppDataLow, then it will damage your computer
a little.

Or in other words, do not use this registry fixer product; it breaks things.

Honestly, I can't recommend using any such fixer, except when in dire
straights. It's too much of a shotgun approach for my taste, though I admit
that they can find genuine problems for you in principle.

I run them from time to time... but I agree I rarely see much change with
them. In some cases, though, it makes a big difference.

[snip]
Amazing. Feel free to snip that in your response... :)

See if I don't!

[snip]
It's only mostly dead. But there's not really such a big difference between
mostly dead and all dead. You can go ahead and rifle through the pockets for
loose change. :D

To fix it would take a miracle. :)

So what troubleshooting do you suggest to track down what the problem was? I
did the "quick fix" of just rebooting.

In this case, it's the "Try it again, while I watch over your shoulder"
approach. I would then immediately see that you used the wrong button. :D

Even that, though, would not tell us *why* it crashed.

[snip]
"End Task" is not, in my experience, all that useful. You only want it if
the program is hung badly enough that the close box won't work. But if a
program is hung that badly, "End Task" won't work. "End Process" is the one
that just terminates the process without chatting it up first. This is the
real "force quit" equivalent.

Fair enough... and I knew better. :)

I thought so. This is what I meant about Task Manager being confusing. I
genuinely do not understand what End Task is even for. Why would you ever want
to use it?

To embarrass me. Of course. :)



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[INSERT .SIG HERE]


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