Windows, Windows, Windows, Blech

I’ve been a fulltime Mac user for seven months now. How quickly we forget. I’ve spent most of today wrangling with a Windows machine, a replacement for a 7 year old server that runs one half of the Vacancy Information Service.

Now I’m not trying to do anything unusual here, not trying to make the computer speak Thai, or interface with a nuclear reactor. I just want to install Windows NT, update NT with various security patches to bring it up to date, and install a couple of applications.

Wow.

First, Windows NT Workstation comes with Internet Explorer version 2, perhaps least least compatible web browser ever made. You would think that Microsoft itself would endeavour to tender at least some offer of backwards compatibility to allow people still saddled with this browser to upgrade. But no. Try visiting the Windows or Internet Explorer pages with Explorer Version 2, and you get a morass of HTML and JavaScript verbiage thrown at you, with no clear method to download an upgrade.

Logical next step was to use Internet Explorer to download Mozilla. This went fine, but post-installation Mozilla refused to run, throwing a clasically cryptic Windows error message that meant absolutely nothing.

Same thing happened with Mozilla Firebird.

I suspect that the problem were simply a result of out of date operating system components. Which I could download using Windows Update. Which I could use if I had a more modern version of Internet Explorer.

I won’t bore you all with the rest of the day’s activities. Suffice to say that it pretty much continued like this. Punctuated by the usual “the software you have installed requires that you reboot your computer.” I think I’ve rebooted about 26 times now.

Still at it…

Tomorrow, luck holding, this machine goes into operation and I go back to my Mac.