Win 7 Professional always freezes at 15% during patch installs

Various machines around the office - all Win7 64bit Professional - freeze during patch install shut down at 15% complete. We hit the reset button, tell it to boot normally when prompted and the patches install just fine. This has happened every time over the past year that we have installed patches. I don't have this issue at home where I am running Win7 64bit Ultimate and Home. Annoying but does not seem to be a show stopper.

I have completed my work on the JIDE update. There are some outstanding issues but others are fixing them while I get back hot and heavy on the MigCalendar scheduler replacement. I have some open Mac issues with Jidesoft. They don't appear to do much testing on the Mac which is a shame. You can basically use the main OS look and feel on the Mac but the other ones are useless. Colors that are not readable, tabs that are not clipped so they paint on other tabs etc.

I was doing various bits of editing of the code under IntelliJ 11 on the Mac and PC and ended up getting SVN all confused. I finally just extracted a fresh copy of the code and renamed the directory to get the Mac to play nice again. I was doing weird stuff like double editing files on my home PC and the Mac laptop then trying to revert on one and check in on the other. Classes were moved to new packages etc. which I am sure caused a great deal of grief. All fixed now, just some of the fun of being a multi-platform developer.

The MigCalendar conversion is going nicely. The new JIDE based grid is so much faster at everything you can hardly believe it is functional, it feels like something should be missing otherwise how can it be this fast? MigCalendar has a lot of wonky ways of doing things and used a lot of static collections to do it. Glad to be rid of it. I did a build yesterday with no MigCalendar references in it at all. I deleted a ton of code and old dialog boxes in the process. Plus the new scheduler is so much more flexible and configurable. The clients are going to be elated when we ship.

I plan on writing an email to the MigCalendar folks letting them know why we are discontinuing the use of their product. I figure developers rarely are notified as to why they have lost a sale so it seems only fair. We just found it to be to bulky, not flexible and the documentation to be poor to non-existent. I was never able to find any useful references on the web either an they only allow you to see their forums if you are paid up on your license. Not a way to run a successful business in our book.

Upgrade Vista to Win7 takes 5 hours - why?

With various upgrades and new hardware in the house only one machine was left running Vista, my wife's Gateway laptop. It has a 1920x1200 screen that she runs at a different DPI to read it easier. Once you do that Chrome screws up and you can't use the upper right button to minimize, maximize or close it. Vista was also having some other issues and since it was the only copy running in the house I decided it was time for it to go.

I had a buddy with exact same hardware do the upgrade and it went smoothly for him. I had a Win7 Ultimate DVD from a MS one day conference so there was no cash outlay. Just to be safe I used my Win7 Ultimate 64bit DVD hoping the key from MS would work. The MS conference DVD just listed 32bit but this was running 64bit Vista and I sure as heck did not want to downgrade that.

Put in the DVD and started the upgrade process around 2 PM. It got down around 7 PM. Really? Why the heck did an upgrade take that long? I really have no idea. It had 6 steps to the process and various steps would get stuck at 20% or some other percentage for over 30 minutes. I just left it alone checking on it every so often and finally the percentage would move. I thought that would only happen during one of the steps but it happened over and over. Plenty of space on the HD and this is not a slow machine but it really drug out the process.

Once that was all done I had to grab some patches off the web and reinstall the video driver with a couple of reboots to make sure it was all happy. Running like a champ and she likes the enhancements offered by Win7. Chrome works, you can right click on task bar items such as Word to see and open recent files, task bar is cleaner, easy to move items between monitors, shake to minimize all others, etc. Plus it is much easier for me to do phone support if every computer in house on same OS. Only the file / print server is on XP. I feel no real need to upgrade that box right away although I do feel the printer / fax / scanner support under XP for the Canon printer we have is a big buggy.

If I would have known it was going to take that long I would have started it earlier in the day. I was worried the upgrade would screw up so I have been putting this off. With a friend pulling it off on same hardware I felt better but I was also using a MS key from a slightly different OS, 32 vs. 64 bit, but all accounts on web said this would work. I did not want to lose any of her existing programs - Quicken, MS Office 2010 and others as she uses it on a daily basis. Anytime you upgrade someone else you want it to go perfect otherwise you hear about it for days. Doing your own hardware is not so bad, you can put up with a lot, but dealing with others is a bear.

Feels good to have this off the books. Nice way to end the weekend and she is happy. I also took some weekend time to rip more of my CD collection to give me some variety of tunes at work. I listen to a lot of older music (80s, 90s) and I have it all on legal CDs that just sit in a cabinet. Good to be able to hear the old hair metal at work. Listening to "The Dark Saga" from Iced Earth right now. My son wanted to try some other songs out too and along the line we lost some stuff I ripped a number of years ago. He wanted Adam Ant back in his play list. I will have to listen to that today too. Good stuff.