Lukas Beeler wrote:
* IBMs documentation sucks. The info center usually lack information,
it's hard to find detailed information about SRCs.
* It's hard to google for i5/OS problems. There are many, many Linux and
Windows users. When googling for problems, you will find myriad of blog
posts, usenet postings, mailing lists archives of people who had the
same problem before.
Then again, some Windows problems are simply out of reach.
I posted in some large-scale Windows forums and ran a whole bunch of
searches looking for an answer to why one Windows system simply
would not boot to anything but safe mode -- no one had a clue nor
any suggestion on how to determine the problem. I disabled drivers,
tracked the boot logs, did all the recommended steps towards problem
determination -- not a hint.
Then, from sheer luck due to moving the PC to another room to get it
out of the way, I started over and... the problem was gone!
It took a bit of frustration even after that to determine that it
was all caused by the original keyboard starting to get flaky. Once
that keyboard was tossed, the PC's been fine ever since.
A second problem came when trying to upgrade a Win98SE PC to
Win2KPro. It simply wouldn't work. For some indiscernible reason, on
_that_ PC "atibt829.sys" wouldn't load. Now, MS has a "fix" on its
site; the access to it is via Windows Update. But the "fix" only
shows up to be downloaded if you connect with a PC that needs it,
i.e., one that has the appropriate adapter and is running Win2k.
Naturally, if I could've done that, I would've been using a PC that
didn't _need_ that fix.
I'm sure there are ways around that, but the 'relatively good'
Windows documentation and on-line support via "blog posts, usenet
postings, mailing list archives", etc., didn't have a recognizable
clue that showed up in any of the many searches that I did.
Sometimes it doesn't work on both sides.
What's unfortunate is that I rarely post problem questions out to
the internet on Windows issues because I can almost always figure
them out myself. But when I do post and do serious searching, I've
yet to find an answer. The eventual answer has always been to give
up. On the fortunate side, that's usually an easy answer simply
because it's cheap simply to replace whatever the system is.
Tom Liotta
midrange.com
