In my world at least. How about in your world? I feel the need because some of my readers will comment this is the latest in my Pro-Apple, Anti-Microsoft campaign, but I say to you not so. This is simply a post about my frustration with Windows today.

It started innocently enough with a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) on my XP OS running on my MacBook Pro (MBP). For those of you who don’t know… a Blue Screen of Death is a System Error on Windows, that causes the computer to completely die. You see a blue screen with a lot of white text, which doesn’t give you a lot of user friendly information. I have no problems with the fact it happens, to quote Judd Nelson as John Bender in The Breakfast Club, “Screws fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place.”. It’s what happens past that, that sucks.

I installed a program, which made me reboot my computer, and then the nice BSoD arrived. And before I could read it, the computer rebooted again. Leaving me with no idea what happened. Next XP did a scan disk, found a group of truncated files located in what I realized was my Anti Virus’s program folders. After the scan, it starts to boot into Windows XP and again, the BSoD and a reboot. WTF?

Frustrated, I tried to hold down the “Shift” key to bypass anything in my start up folder (I know how Mac of me…) but seems that only works if you are logging in, and much like OS X, XP is by default set to automatically login the user if only one is defined. Bother. I decided to enlist the help of my coworkers to see if there was some way to get the message to stay. I knew I could boot into “Safe Mode” but I had no clue what was wrong.

My coworker did inform me that on the Safe mode screen you can disable the reboot following a BSoD. I asked why would anyone WANT a reboot after an error like that. He said he didn’t know either but we disabled it and waited again while XP scanned the hard drive, truncated some files and then BSoD’ed again. This time I saw the error was something about Paged something or other. Hmmph. Reboot a fourth time and this time go into “Safe Mode“. This time I turned off the “Services” (at my friends advisement) for both the Application I installed and the one that the Scan Disk reported was having it’s files truncated. I also switched off automatic login so that I could see WHEN the BSoD was happening.

Blue Screen of Death, on my Mac no less!

XP successfully booted this time. I went and started the service of the new application I installed and it caused the machine to crash. But now, I had to reboot into safe mode, turn off the Service again and reboot. Uninstalling the application did not work however, I get an error on uninstalling too. I guess I can go and try to manually remove the application, clean up the registry, remove the service etc.

Now this may seem like not too much trouble but let me tell you…that’s not the case. Each time I had to boot into Safe Mode took approximately 20 minutes. It was a mess. And I still need that application and it’s not working.

Also today, I needed to install some software on my work laptop. Which caused me to restart my machine 3 times. All three times on shut down, I was told that my Virus Protection program could not be ended. I got a dialog box with an End Now or Cancel button. Cancel does not stop Shutdown, and why do I need to click the End Now button? I’ve initiated a shut down. I don’t care it crashed. Just automatically do an “End Now”. I don’t need the option! Just get the damn thing shut down!

Ugh… so I officially declare that today is “Windows Frustration Day”