Since I am a developer, I don’t usually go out of my way to make disparaging remarks about other software companies.\u00a0 Oh, we programmers ARE an opinionated bunch, but we ALL have been humbled by the complexity of the environment we work in and the difficulty of accommodating the non-standard “standards” that apply.\u00a0 But our basic mantra is: “Do no harm”.<\/p>\n
I have encountered the egregious breach of that mantra just today.\u00a0 Read on and have caution!<\/p>\n
About a month ago a purchased a new laptop, as my Gateway was LONG in the tooth and was lumbering under the bloat of the latest development tools and frameworks.\u00a0 It is an Acer Travelmate 8572.\u00a0 With an Intel i7 64 bit processor (Quad Core!) I expected some great gains in speed and productivity.\u00a0 Alas, I am not completely happy with it, even at 64 bits it won’t support more than 4GB RAM and the graphics resolution isn’t as high as I want\u00a0 (but that is all another story).<\/p>\n
I had installed Windows 7 Ultimate and have had very good luck with it.\u00a0 Some incompatibilities and hassles, but overall, a good experience.\u00a0 However, in the last few days my bluetooth headset has been acting flaky so I decided to install some updated bluetooth drivers.\u00a0 No joy, I still had intermittent loss of connection.\u00a0 So I decided to remove the device drivers, reboot and then reinstall.<\/p>\n
Removing the drivers, no problem.\u00a0 I rebooted and then attempted to reinstall the software.\u00a0 It couldn’t find the hardware. DOH!\u00a0 Function-F3 activated the hardware and the software started to install,\u00a0 but first it began by uninstalling the software.\u00a0 Progress bar got to about 75% and then just sat, and sat, and sat.\u00a0 I saw plenty of hard drive activity but no progress.\u00a0 So I decided to check email while I was waiting.\u00a0 The shortcut said it couldn’t find the thunderbird.exe file that was referenced.\u00a0 That’s weird!\u00a0 I followed the link to the folder for Mozilla Thunderbird.\u00a0 Not there! NO FOLDER!!!! Then my icons started to disappear off of my desktop.\u00a0 So, I immediately shut down the system.\u00a0 I restarted and now the entire desktop was gone and I was down to just some basic folders and programs on the start menu.\u00a0 Basically nothing left in the Program Files folder.\u00a0 The system was hammered.\u00a0 After pondering what I should do and thinking I had picked up some nasty malware I started a System Restore.\u00a0 It ran for about 45 minutes.\u00a0 While I was running the restore, I decided to Google WIDCOMM and uninstall and delete and I found this:<\/p>\n
http:\/\/social.answers.microsoft.com\/Forums\/en-US\/w7performance\/thread\/ffe5f236-da04-4c3c-8df9-696080ec9d0c<\/a><\/p>\n Basically the WIDCOMM uninstall will go rogue and delete the data on the C drive.\u00a0 This is confirmed by Microsoft (signed driver!)\u00a0 and so MS is an accessory to hard drive murder IMHO.\u00a0 The negligence of WIDCOMM in producing such a flawed POS (piece of software) is unconscionable.\u00a0 These folks apparently are clueless software developers and, no doubt, the software was probably developed off shore by low cost programmers in order to maximize their profits.<\/p>\n The System Restore did very little to get things functioning again.\u00a0 So, now I will have to reformat and reinstall EVERYTHING!!\u00a0 Thanks Widcomm!<\/p>\n Anyone game for a Class Action Suit against Widcomm?\u00a0 I’ll lose at least a day of productivity.\u00a0 That is worth a few bucks to me….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since I am a developer, I don’t usually go out of my way to make disparaging remarks about other software companies.\u00a0 Oh, we programmers ARE an opinionated bunch, but we ALL have been humbled by the complexity of the environment … Continue reading