Having A Bad Where? Day

Isn't it funny how - after a while - you tend not to notice, or you ignore the annoying habits of your closest colleagues. As I work from home, some 5,000 miles away from my next closest colleagues, the closest colleague I have is Microsoft Vista (yes, I do lead a sad and lonely life doing my remote documentation engineering thing). I mean, I've accepted that sometimes when I open a folder in Windows Explorer it will decide to show me a completely different view of the contents from the usual "Details" view I expect. I suppose it's my own fault because I happen to have a few images in there as well as Word documents, and Vista thinks it's being really helpful by telling me how I rated each one rather than stuff I want to know - like the date it was last modified.

But worse of all is the search feature, or perhaps I should call it an unfeature. In XP, I could select a folder and enter a partial file name then watch as it wandered through the subtree (which, with my terrible memory of where I put stuff was often "C:\"). It told me where it was looking, and I knew it was just looking at filenames. If I only wanted to search the contents of files, I could tell it to do that. In Vista, I type something in the search box and get a warning that the folder isn't indexed, then a slow progress bar. I've no idea where it's looking, or what it's looking for. And neither does it by the look of the results sometimes.

It seems to decide by itself whether to look inside files (so when I search for some part of a filename I get a ton of hits for files that happen to contain that text), yet it seems incapable of finding the matching files by name. I have to either wait till its finished or open the Search Tools dialog before I can get at the advanced options to tell it what kind of search I want and if I want all subfolders to be included. And when I do look for something in the contents of the files, I get either 1,000 hits or none at all. In fact, I've actually resorted to using TextPad to search for strings in text files recently. And after all that, I have to go clicking around the folder tree (while trying to cope with the contents oscillating widly from side to side as I open each one) to get back to where I was because it helpfully moved the folder view to the very end of my long and complicated list of folders.

I can see that the Vista approach may be easier and quicker for simple searches, but I can't help feeling that it often just gets in the way by trying to be too clever and "usable" (something I've grumbled about before - see Easter Bonnets and Adverse Automation). Maybe some of the problem is that I'm continually creating and deleting folders and moving stuff around as I gracefully slither between projects and my other daily tasks. I've tried setting default folder and search options, but I guess Vista can't cope with my indecisiveness. Perhaps I should just keep everything in one folder called "Stuff". But then I'd need a really good search engine...

Probably a lot of this ranting comes about because of the totally wasted day spent trying to get some updated software to run on my machine. The software in question uses a template and some DLLs that get loaded into Word, some other DLLs that do magic conversion things with the documents, and some PowerShell scripts that drive the whole caboodle. So after the installation, PowerShell refused to have anything to do with my scripts, even though I configured the appropriate execution policy setting. Finally I managed to persuade it to load the scrips, but all it would do was echo back the command line. In the end, I copied the scripts from the new folder into the existing one where the previous version was located, and the scripts ran! How do you figure that? Is there some magic setting for folder permissions that I have yet to discover?

And then I had to run installutil to get the script to find some cmdlets in another assembly, and delay sign a couple of other assemblies that barfed with Vista's security model. After about 6 hours work, it looked like it was all sorted - until I went back into Word to discover that the assemblies it requires now produced a load error. In the end, the only working setup I could achieve was by uninstalling and going back to the previous version. And people wonder why I tend to shy away from upgrading stuff...

At least there is some good news - the latest updates to Hyper-V I installed that morning included a new version of the integration components, and (at least at the moment) I've still got a proper mouse pointer in my virtual XP machine (see Cursory Distractions). So I guess the whole day wasn't wasted after all.

Footnote: Actually it was - my mouse pointer has just gone back to a little black dot...

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 14, 2009
  I like your blog. Thank you for sharing
• Anonymous
  June 14, 2009
  Thanks for the kind feedback Alex, it's nice to know somebody enjoys my weekly ramblings!