If At First You Don't Succeed...

The Definition of Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. -- Albert Einstein

When dealing with Microsoft products the definition of insanity is: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same results.

I thought I was being clever when I bought software to change may partition sizes so I would not have to reinstall Windows 7 yet again... But a few days after resizing my C: partition and the hidden System Reserved partition I noticed that the system could not recognize my optical drive any more. I tried several times uninstalling the device driver and reinstalling it, but every time I tried to reinstall it Windows reported that the driver was corrupted. Interestingly enough I was able to boot from the optical drive because I used the Windows 7 Setup DVD to try to repair the operating system - unfortunately that did not fix the problem.

Then I also notice that my printers stopped working and I could not seem to fix them. I was also having problems with the print spooler and had to keep restarting it.

Finally I tried restoring the system image from my previous backup. That seemed to fix the printer problem, but not the optical drive problem. I figured that during the resizing of my partitions there was probably some file system damage - given that it took over 25 hours of solid disk activity to perform the operation. There seemed nothing left to do but to do a clean install of Windows 7, yet again.

Unfortunately I had invited my sisters and nephews over to finally see Gemini - but I had to cancel because so many things were not working right, and I needed a full weekend to work on getting Gemini working again.

Overall the installation went fairly smoothly - no real surprises. I was very methodical, taking notes at every step. When I past all the Windows updates I started installing drivers and applications. The first application I installed was my BitDefender security software because I wanted to make sure that while I was installing the rest of my applications I was not introducing any malware into the system.

Next I stated attaching devices to Gemini. I have gotten into the habit of disconnecting all my devices: USB drive, printers, TV-tuner, etc because it makes the update process slower and more stable. Each time I did something I kept checking the state of the Optical Drive - and it seemed OK.

I bought three computer games after Christmas: Dragon Age Origins, Mass Effect, and East India Company. All three seemed to install properly, but Mass Effect and East India Company would not run because of some error that told me to wait for a future update. Interestingly enough a week later Windows automatically downloaded an updated version of Mass Effect and that seem to fix that problem. I still haven't tried East India Company yet.

A week later I've got most things installed again and restored my personal files. So far nothing seems to be persistently wrong - aside from the usual Windows networking that never works right. In the case of Windows it's netbroken. Anyway, I'm really hoping this is the last time I have to install Windows 7 again. I've gotten really good at it, but it usually takes a whole weekend of my time - time I could better spend doing fun things.

Cheers, Eric