Mon Jun 28 13:29:32 PDT 2004

I am so angry with windows right now, I'm physically shaking.

I'll start at the beginning. One of the people here at Collation has been
using his own computer since he started with the company. This is ok with
me until he started having problems that seemed to be due to spyware, and
other crap that was installed on the computer. At one point, some spyware
or virus or whatever decided to eat one of his DLLs, and so I re-imaged
the machine from scratch with our supported build.

Of course, then we had to install Earthlink dialup which seemed to screw
outlook, and his wireless connectivity to his home network. Also, when
he was dialed in to earthlink, his sent email would sit in his outbox.

Eventually I found that earthlink was blocking outbound port 25. Of course,
the problem still seemed to happen when the vpn was active which should
have circumvented the problem, but thats besides the point.

So, I changed our mailserver to also listen on port 2525, and configured
his outlook to send to the port and things started working ok.

Well, after a while, some weird stuff started happening, so I finally
just gave up and bought him a new laptop. I was smart enought to take
a snapshot of the laptop when it first arrived - before installing
anything because, well, because its windows and I just knew it was going
to fuck me over. I then handed the laptop over to this other guy here at
work and asked him to configure it with all the software, etc.

Today, the vp comes to me and says, look, I can't print and I really need
this fixed. I think to myself, "Well, its Monday, and I'm not stressed out
enough - better go look at the laptop".

The first thing I find is that windows has forgotten the WEP key for our
wireless network. This doesn't surprise me much as I've had this happen before.
So, I put in the wep key and then I bring up a cmd prompt. Now, I notice
that his home directory (if thats what you call it on windows) is

c:\Documents and Settings\BILL_2\

hmmmm, it should be C:\Documents and Settings\BILL\

I go in to user account manager and find that his name is bill...
looks ok to me. Then I go into the printer manager and guess what....
all the stuck jobs are owned by BILL_2
Ok, so thats fine.... I rename the account to "fred" and reboot.
Now, I login as admin and go to the account manager, and create a new account
called bill, logout, log back in as bill, bring up a command prompt and what
do you think I find?

BILL_3

I'm trying to find out where the first bill is...... I remember a long time
ago that win2k would freak out if you tried to create an account with the
same name as the computer, so I check the computer name.

Computer name is:  Bill's

Don't ask me how the hell that happened. 
So, I rename the computer to DY46PH11, and reboot, go into account manager,
rename the bill account to foo and create a new bill account.

Yep, you guessed it - BILL_4

I'm fucked. I guess I have to re-image this fucking laptop.
This is the stuff that makes me hate windows. Its never ending.