howeird | Marathon (Reply)

I really wanted to do more today than sit in front of a computer. But it took 2.5 hours on the phone with Microsoft tech support to fix the BSOD which upgrading to Vista SP1 from XP Pro inflicted on me. Both techs I worked with were good. Methodical, logical, told me when they had to put me on hold to look something up or ask someone else. Both non-native English speakers, but both perfectly understandable. One Scandinavian and one Middle Eastern. It took a long time because of Microsoft's legendary piece-of-crap KDB, which is full of vague hints but not a lot of answers.

And it took longer than it should because Vista's BSOD is useless as a troubleshooting tool. The error message, BAD_POOL_CALLER at 0x000000C2 is simply a "one of your 12,384 drivers is freaking out Vista".

Turned out to be two drivers. I have a PCI wireless adapter from D-link which caused the initial crash, but once we disabled that and got from 64% installed to 89% installed, it took disabling the modem driver to get past the BSOD. Simply removing those and re-installing allowed both devices to come up properly. WTF?

Now I have to call Adobe, because the upgrade broke their asinine Pagemaker and InDesign licenses. And Seamagic hangs during the login process, so I'm writing this straight into LJ. If anyone can suggest another Vista-friendly LJ editor, I'd be much obliged.

Dress rehearsal at 6:30. Maybe I'll have time for something else before then. Maybe.