| [ | Tags | | | corporate culture, cross-purposes, documentation, funny, institutional autism, it, microsoft, registry, syndicate, the french revolution, windows 7 | ] |
The plan to wipe my OS and clean-install Windows 7 (somewhat complicated my my non-functioning optical drive) quickly derailed; I underestimated the how much pure spite Vista would muster on the way out.
In order to fully back up one of my program’s settings, I had to upgrade Vista to the most recent service pack.
The Service Pack installer installer departitioned my hard drive.
(Alright, technically the Service Pack installer simply hard-crashed the laptop and hosed the registry, rendering it unbootable. It was the mid-task crash of “oh crap!” system recovery tools on the emergency partition which scagged the partition.)
Long story short; after I recovered the recovery tools, I had a factory-fresh Vista SP”0″ install. Reasoning that if there was any upgrade scenario Microsoft could be counted on to not screw up “upgrade from a virgin install” was it, I walked Vista up through all its service packs and did an upgrade install instead of wipe.
It was pleasantly easy! While Vista committing Hari Kari makes me one of the 1% of installers who encountered major but fixable problems, once out from under its thumb things went a lot smoother.
The registry is an awkward mish-mash of Vista and Win 7 values… but I’m not sure that’s not just what Win 7 looks like. I’ve already caught it replying on registry values for windows layout that the MS documentation claims have been deprecated with Win 7 in favor of new bitwise value stacks, and it’s got this eye-crossingly-bizarre “optical illusion” double system folder structure for compatibility with old programs (need to figure out how to hide those non-existent folders while still viewing hidden files…) but overall it’s gratifying stable.
I’m being gentle on the system, exerting only minimal registry edits and deep-system settings changes so far. Once I get my software installed, I’m going to make a disk snapshot I can roll back to if/when the system gets Horribly Wrong in the future. “Vista + 7 days of setup.”
Reset button!
Redmond English: Where “Compatibility” Means New, Not Old
Some of Win7’s interface changes are baffling, but this is my favorite so far.
If you try to run a program that’s not Win-7 compatible it pops up a dialog box telling you that it’s not compatible with the OS, which you close… and 2 seconds later Windows pops up a second box telling you the exact same thing.
That’s not horrible by Microsoft’s standards, it’s just silly.
The fact your only two options are “reinstall” (which of course assumes you still have the installers on your hard drive) and “nope, there are no problems”… that’s funny.
The Program Compatibility Assistant doesn’t modify the compatibility settings of the program so that it will run– it makes you to reinstall it instead. It doesn’t even mention Compatibility Mode.
If you go to the help page linked at the bottom of the window it doesn’t mention Compatibility Mode either, though there is a buried reference to a Program Compatibility Wizard (separate from the Assistant and not launchable from it) which probably configures it.
At no point is “right-click, hit ‘properties’, see the Compatibility tab” mentioned. The Wizard which configures Comparability Mode is mentioned… but it’s not linked from the assistant or the help. They have completely obscured the actual program-compatibility settings in favor of uninstalling and reinstalling the program.
What if it’s it’s an old program and the install disk is either missing or doesn’t work on Vista? Buy a new version! Sure, it probably would have worked fine in Compatibility Mode… but we’re not going to tell you that.
The Shaggy Dog Has Failed, Do you With to SEND an Error Report?
That’s still not the funny part. If you find the double-warning annoying and want to turn the Comparability-Assistant-which-doesn’t-assist-with-comparability-but-instead-just-launches-uninstallers off, the Help file insists “you really shouldn’t!” and then grudgingly tells you it can be “adjusted by using Group Policy,” and links you to the Microsoft website for IT professionals.
Not to a page about Group Policy. To a landing page.
A landing page for Windows Vista users.
Apparently by coincidence this month’s “spotlight” article on the landing page is an article on Group Policy… written 18 months ago? (Come February you’re really going to be out of luck, it’s the only time the subject is mentioned on this page!)
Assuming you manage to plow through the metric shit-ton of high level system-management-for-IT-departments theory, it does finally tell you all this magic is accomplished via the Group Policy Editor, and gives instructions on how to launch it.
(This is the funny part.)
The Group Policy Editor is only available on Windows Professional editions (or Business editions for Vista.) So:
$bull;To disable their program Compatibility assistant which does not assist in compatibility,
$bull;Which pops up a redundant warning on a lag,
$bull;And obscures the existence of real Compatibility support which would fix the problem,
$bull;In order to make things simple for the home user…
Windows Help says you can;
$bull;Not disable it,
$bull;But you can “adjust” its Group Policy…
$bull;And links you to a website for IT Professionals,
$bull;On a Vista landing page that has nothing to do with Group Policy,
$bull;That if you are lucky enough to visit in the right month,
$bull;Might link to an article on the subject,
$bull;Telling you to use a program,
$bull;Which most Editions of Windows lack.
Bonus round: Nowhere in the text of the page on the site, or the landing page, or even on the home page above that… do the words “Edition”, “Business”, “Premium”, or “Ultimate” appear. “Professional” appears… but purely as an adjective, not a proper noun relating to a Vista edition.
The entire site which you are directly linked to by the Windows 7 help reference for instructions on how to accomplish this task… is written with the assumption that you have the most expensive version of Windows. The one all the software engineers who developed the OS (and apparently write the help files) use.
And they are so isolated from the consumer-level editions of Windows that talk of “editions” doesn’t even appear on the site– the people writing the help and support files are themselves– institutionally– blind to the fact that the vast majority of the people using Windows are running crippled versions with features and utilities removed and restricted user rights.
A Mental Disconnect to Make You Lose Your Head
This is not exactly a surprise. When looking up help for Windows Vista I’d sometimes be directed to use the Command Prompt.
While my command prompt reads “C:/Users/MyName,” and the screen-shots in the instructions would invariably read “C:/”.
Because the people writing the support documentation are naturally all running the Administrator accounts. No, not “an administrator,” the Administrator– the secret “True Administrator” account that doesn’t have all ther permissions restrictions that Users set as “an Administrator” do.
Step 1 — Switch to the root directory of your drive.
RRAUGH! NORMAL USER ACCOUNTS CAN’T SWITCH TO THE ROOT DIRECTORY OF THE DRIVE. THE CAN’T BACK UP ANY HIGHER THAN “C:/Users/UserName”! EVEN WHEN THE COMMAND PROMPT WAS LAUNCHED WITH “Run as Administrator!”
(That was a frequent Vista irritation for me. It may have changed under 7.) The point is… the corporate culture at Microsoft is getting extra toxic. OS editions are no longer separate products developed for different platforms or needs… they’re a single product with features messily yanked out for anyone who doesn’t feel like paying twice as much.
Because the “editions” are no longer developed as distinct products there are no software engineers who know what the Home Edition is like– they never worked on it because the Home Edition isn’t a separate project, they worked on the Ultimate Edition!
And is that their fault? Do we honestly expect a software engineer or IT professional to be running his OS in crippled-mode with no rights and half the core utilities missing?
But they’re the ones providing support… So the support we get is consistently out of touch with the actual experience (and abilities) of the user.
HOME EDITION USER: “My family has no bread, they are starving!”
ULTIMATE EDITION SUPPORT: “Let them eat cake!”
Meanwhile at the other end… User Experience people are trying (desperately) to scale down this huge Ultimate-OS monolithic OS into something moms can use to send pictures of their kids without screwing it up. So they take away all their rights, restrict them to user folders, create an account level called Administrator that doesn’t actually give them Administrator privileges so they can’t fuck things up too bad… and we get Compatibility Assistant help files that don’t tell you about the actual Compatibility controls out of a desire to ‘keep it simple.’
“Can you turn it off? Um, that’s… do they even have access to that? …look you really shouldn’t, but here’s a link– good luck!”
Caveat: The Fault Lies With the Business, Not the Engineering
Fair shake to all involved here… I strongly suspect the Group Policy Editor (or some version of it) was originally slated to be standard in all editions of Windows 7 at some point; it shows up a lot in Microsoft’s Win7 Support files and there’s never a mention of Editions. Features like “Use Classic Start Menu” were moved from the Start properties to the Group Policy Editor (what does this have to do with Group Policy?) should obviously go hand in hand with the new Classic Theme. The editor seems to have been ganked from Home Editions by beancounters at the last minute when they realized people would pay an extra $100 to get the classic Start Menu back with the click of a box.
That’s the last item on my list before I consider myself properly “moved in.” GPEdit is just a registry wizard, the classic menu can be enabled without it! …it’s going to be painful though.
Maybe I can get someone who has Ultimate to snapshot their registry before and after enabling it and create a .reg of the difference? That would at least tell me what parameters are in play.
Hrm, I suppose the the UI elements for the classic menu might be sequestered in a shell .dll Home lacks, but the .reg entries would indicate which one, so that’s not a big deal to get around…
That’s still not the funny part…
In all the failure, poor communication, poor support, institutional autism, goals at cross-purposes and general slow-motion train wreck that is Microsoft in general and the Program Compatibility Assistant in microcosm… that’s still not the funny part.
The PCA’s documentation is wrong when it said you can’t deactivate it. It’s a Service.
• Search “View Local Sevices” in the [Control Pannel],
• Open “Program Comparability Assistant” from the alphabetized list,
• Change it to “Disabled.”
It takes about 20 seconds. There are no registry edits, curly braces or system handles nested within %’s. It’s point-and-click.
How did the IT-gurus writing the documentation miss this?
Answer: It’s a mental blindspot. Disabling the service that way kills it on the Local Machine, it will be deactivated for all user accounts. IT-gurus oversee IT departments, managing and maintaining system and user profiles across dozens or hundreds of systems. So they naturally think in terms of users and groups… which can only be modified via the Group Policy Editor, a tool designed specifically for managing those kinds of floating profiles.
Local Machine settings affect just that machine, and it forces the setting on other users who use that computer too! It’s completely outside of the “User Account” system. That approach probably wouldn’t even occur to the kind of IT-guy who writes this documentation, because it’s Not The Way to Do Things for an IT Department.
…but for a home user that’s only running one account it’s perfect.
The Funny Part
So caught up in dumbing down the Windows Compatibility Assistant’s documentation for the “home consumer” that they forgot the “Home” part, ignored the simple answer and ended up overthinling it. Method recapitulates Mindset.
Of course the really funny thing is… Because the IT gurus who write the documentation now all have Full Power editions of Windows with registry wizards that manage complex settings changes for them– and are omitted from the Home Edition–they no longer have any reason to fully document what the registry values do … while more and more unskilled home users (lacking wizards) will be attempting them by hand!
Ha ha ha he ha! …wait.
That’s not funny.
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