Sunday, May 14, 2017

Windows 10 - the perils of the update

I haven't written about my computer's operating system for a while so you might have thought all the problems, the criticism and the carping had gone away. Alas, the golden rule of IT is that if you have a good working product then it has to be "updated" or "enhanced" or "f*****ed up" (as we ex-IT professionals say). Yesterday there were two full restarts and updates, then a message about some glorious new future with something called the "Creator's edition". Microsoft still, after all these years, doesn't seem to understand the fundamental difference between an operating system and the programmes (or "apps", if you insist) that run on it. 

There was a scheduled reboot in the early hours to apply the finishing touches and I woke up my pc this morning hoping all was over. I entered my password on the loading screen and saw a message I had never seen before in some 25 years of using Windows - "User profile service failed the logon". And back to the loading screen. Ah, what to do? I tried again a couple of times. Same result. I tried the alternate profile that I created soon after installation last year but have never used. Same result. No help whatsoever on the screen to explain what this error means and how to progress.

A quick internet search on my mobile revealed this is normally indicates a corruption of the user profile and the standard recommendation is to use another. Fairly unhelpful in my case when both profiles are being rejected. Going into safe mode and activating a default admin account was also posited but in the end I settled for the good old-fashioned reboot and this time the profiles were accepted and everything was good.

Everything that is, except my carefully crafted desktop picture of the wonderful National Trust property Cotehele, site of some of our regular holidays. It had been replaced with some ghastly Microsoft blue screen. Why? Yes, I was able to retrieve it so no harm done. But why? All other desktop settings had been retained. What had my humble jpg done to incur the wrath of the coders from Redmond? Perhaps we shall never know.

The system did stick up a brand new email program and immediately complain that it wasn't associated with an email account. The fact that my emails go into Microsoft's very own Outlook 2007 seemed to pass it by. I think it may be a bit pushier with one or two other things, like hinting that I use Edge; we shall see.

My point in writing this little bit of spleen is to emphasise that the system had failed to load correctly, it had given me an error message but had not provided any assistance in solving the problem. I could not use the pc to access the internet to find a solution because the desktop had not loaded nor had I been given the offer of a default desktop. Despite all the help and user-friendliness supposedly embedded in Windows, when a critical problem occurred, there was no help at all. I can well imagine this causing genuine distress for some less experienced users.

All this a couple of days after a massive encryption-ransomware virus spread across the world, doing severe damage to the systems used by many NHS hospitals and surgeries. I saw this at first hand - whilst visiting my mother-in-law at Northwick Park Hospital, a porter arrived in the ward to take another patient away and told her "There'll be a delay love, all our servers have gone down".  Appointment systems were shut, forcing cancellation of operations and access to patients' data was restricted. The worst of this seems to be over for now, helped by a bug within the ransomware that allowed it to be halted, but the next one could be worse. Cuts in IT support expenditure in the NHS have made it very vulnerable.

We, as a species, have only become reliant on computers for the lifespan of about one generation and the speed of the adoption has been way too rapid for us to keep up. If they fail we don't have adequate fallbacks. It's getting a bit scary.






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