I still can’t get SP1 loaded onto Vista. I’ve read that it’s due to not having the correct drivers installed, so I’ve updated a whole load of drivers most of which were OK and a few were updated, but still SP1 refuses to install.

A couple of days later I was using the Vista PC and an authentication window popped up and said that some hardware had been changed and that Vista needed re-authenticating. It also said that if the re-authentication failed that Windows would no longer work. I assume that Vista thinks that the hardware has been changed because of the new drivers as I haven’t changed any hardware on that PC for many months. I let Vista re-authenticate itself and that was successful, but this is a bit worrying in that I wasn’t very far away from getting a non-working machine due to Vista convincing itself that the hardware had changed when it most definitely hadn’t.

I heard back from the carpet bombing agent the other day about his 3,000 emails to contractors. The City company that wanted 9 test people asked him to submit 3 resumes for each position i.e. 27. You would have thought that out of the 3,000 emails he sent out he’d get 27 decent responses. Not so. He did get a response from about 600 people but out of all that he only found 17 suitable candidates, including me thank the lord. 

The agent said that there were a heck of a lot of people with the HSMP (Highly Skilled Migration Permit) visa but that a lot of them  have what could be called ‘generic’ resumes. Apparently they find someone with a decent resume and put their name on it. A-hem. Trouble is these people are found out as when the resume is written to the agents database and subsequently re-accessed as the resume fits a search selection, a whole load are found to be exactly the same, apart from the name. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

Not sure if I believe this happens a lot, but it would only need to happen once and it becomes a great story.

Is everyone viewing Windows XP through rose tinted spectacles?

I prefer XP to Vista as its just easier to use and most software works on it but it still gets itself in a mess sometimes. I always have trouble with XP when its been switched off for a while, which sounds daft. I was away at the weekend and when I switched the XP machine back on it got a bit messy and I had to rerun XP setup with a SP2 disk. That ran OK but of course I ended up with IE v6 which caused some issues.

As I had been using IE v7 with 6 tabs when I started IE v6 it read a config file somewhere which told v6 to load the 6 tabs that were used by v7. It took about 15 minutes to load 6 instances of IE v6 and all were a mess. So if I can’t start IE v6 how do I download v7? I got around that by downloading the XP verson of IE v7 on the Vista PC and copied that to the XP PC via the network and successfully installed IE v7. 

Another problem that rerunning XP setup was that it mashed a driver file for the HP printer. I downloaded the driver file from HP and that got jammed. No way was that going to run. The way around that was to uninstall every piece of HP software to do with the printer, rebooting the PC and redownloading and running the HP driver installation file.  

I then ran Microsoft Update which found about 8 upgrades to be applied and they steadfastly failed to install whether I do the auto update or custom update. Still working on that. I’ve also just seen that my username has disappeared from the Documents and Settings folder where all of my documents were stored. Thank heavens for backups.

I was listening to Leo Laporte and Paul Thurrott and Laporte was saying how he would love to be able to use Windows 2000 again as it was so rock solid. I don’t remember it being that. What I do remember is it  blue screened a lot. Maybe one of the reasons people don’t want to use Vista is that they think Microsoft haven’t finished XP yet, finished as in a stable product, and don’t want to get involved in the testing of Vista right now.