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One customer's hard drive was failing (severely; hundreds of weak sectors) and I rescued the data to a location on my network. She had an extended warranty through WorstBest Buy, so I told her to get her drive replaced and get the system up and running and then I would copy her data back to the new drive.

When Geek Squad took a look at the drive, they told her they wouldn't replace it as it was working fine. Sure it was, that's why Windows boots up just fine and there are no bad blocks found by Spinrite or badblocks(8).</sarcasm>

I told her to raise hell until she got her drive replaced, and to tell them to run sector tests on the drives because it's very plain to see that the drive is failing. Just because the S.M.A.R.T. status shows up fine doesn't mean the drive is fine. She finally got it replaced and I finally got her data back to her. Oh yeah, and they left no OS on it - I had to use the Toshiba recovery DVD and install all of the updates myself. I guess Geek Squad doesn't really care if a person's computer is up and running and safe or not.

Speaking of up-and-running, a second customer with a failing hard drive went through the same deal with me. Apparently his drive was failing bad enough because Geek Squad didn't bitch about it being fine, and just replaced it. I put on the ticket that the computer should be brought back when it is up and running so that I could copy the data back at no additional charge (I only charged 1 hour of labor for the whole recovery).

He brought the machine back today and there's no operating system on it at all. Geek Squad had told him that I could copy what I salvaged off the drive back onto the new drive to make it work again. Sure, that's going to fly. So now I have to charge an additional hour of labor to reinstall and update Windows because Geek Squad... I don't know. I just don't like (most) Geek Squad agents. I understand that there are some of you out there that are like me, and that's fine, but as an organization, Geek Squad is pretty shabby.

Every step forward seems like a step backward. I used to have a 1.0 design (which I posted about before) that was really neat, but I had to keep working on the current beta line to keep it maintained (and now it's fallen into disrepair). Then I became very busy at work and didn't even have time to answer any of my emails (about 500) for about a month. I apologize if I haven't answered your email. I will get to it, actually, starting Saturday morning. I'll answer all my emails and then begin working on Dial-a-fix again, because it needs overhauling (again - did I say "again" yet?). Every time I plop down a foundation (like that 1.0 teaser post), it comes up short and I have to start over again.

Again. Again. There, I've used it so much it's no longer a word.

Good thing Tarun is over there at the Lunarsoft.net forums helping out with Dial-a-fix support, or else everyone would be in the dark.

Oh yeah and Ninja Rope, I am still going to use ntdel as planned and The Notifier will live once again. Too bad it dies with Vista; Vista doesn't have Winlogon\Notify keys. Edit: Actually, Vista does. They're just in a different place and have a different syntax. Take a look at:

Brad B. at Digital Doctors has been running Vista for about a week now. He had issues with his Soundblaster Audigy card and its drivers, so he decided to remove the card and simply use onboard (since it's close enough).

After doing so, Vista claimed that he had made a major hardware change and that he needed to activate again. He didn't have a good feeling about it, but he said OK and attempted to activate online. Denied. Then, he called the automated activation line. Phone activation also failed. He was transferred to a human.

The rep couldn't activate it either. The rep said that he would have to pay $59 to activate Vista again. What? He's only had Vista for a week!

After several expletives from Brad, the rep attempted to get a supervisor. A supervisor was nowhere to be found.

Finally, a three-way call was performed and forced activation was attempted. Denied again. In the end, a supervisor was finally found and Brad is now activated again.

Ugh.

Ah, I see that Vista's preview handlers crash twice as often as XP's shmedia and shimgvw handlers.

If you open a folder full of movies and pictures, you can almost guarantee COM Surrogate will crash constantly until it gets through every file you have (and it trudges through every subdirectory to do so).

In Explorer, click Organize > Folder and Search Options (or Tools > Folder Options), then go to the View tab. Checkmark Always show icons, never thumbnails.

Edit: As Simon has pointed out in the comments below, the main cause is usually third-party software (of which I was afflicted when I wrote this post). I'm sure one of those retarded codec packs causes it for most people (dear god people, stop using codec packs and just get VLC Player).

Simon Zerafa stated:

The main culprit seems to be older versions of Nero (the Vista Upgrade advisor flags these as incompatible with Vista) and DivX players.

It seems to be caused by third party players and applications that patch those functions in XP / Vista to allow previews in Explorer.

Updating the affected software to Vista compatible versions seem to be the best course of action. Failing that, find Vista-compatible alternatives.

I posted before about BenQ's use of the WTC wreckage as a background image, and they have since apologized and "put a process in place to prevent this type of incident from happening again". I never went back to the site so I didn't know they had already changed it.

At the time of writing, they have an apology graphic up at http://www.benq.com.cn/musiq/

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000778.html