Man… this is going to be hard :-) As part of the Vaio Influencer Program, a laptop has been sent to Ireland to reside in the loving care and attention span of Tom Raftery. Hardly unpacked, Raftery already pointed out a few bugs, one of them kept me and a few colleagues busy for quite a few hours yesterday. Reproducing the error was quite easy, but fixing it… that was something else. Eventually we managed to find out what the bug was and what it was caused by.
Tom couldn’t ’send to documents’ by right-clicking a powerpoint file on his desktop. Explorer crashed, Vista recovered. That’s not really pleasant to experience, and I must say it’s not something I tried out before shipping the laptops. So, what was going on here? We’ve done uninstalls of OneCare and Office, reinstalled it, had it updated… the entire show. Nothing seemed to help. We switched from laptop to laptop to start from zero again with the clean install, but still no results. Then my colleague Tom Mertens came up with the solution.
It appears that if you prepare a laptop in full (install all programs, gadgets etc) and then sysprep it to erase all user data, it causes the ‘documents’ folder to be un-assigned to a profile on another laptop when you then take an image of the ‘cleaned’ laptop to install it on the others. Weird, but true.
So. We’ve fixed the issue on the remaining laptops that still need to be sent out, and here’s how it works (should you accidentally end up in the same situation): You open the ‘documents’ folder and leave it open, right-click the file to be sent and it’ll work fine. In the future, you’ll no longer have to keep the documents folder open, apparently it only needs to be done once, and only if you’ve installed the laptop with an image from a sysprepped device. After that, we’ve encountered no more issues alike with files from the desktop.
Some people ask me why on Earth you’d ask a guy like Tom Raftery to bash your products around. Well, this is exactly why. The guy sniffs bugs like it was fresh air, points them out so we can solve them. There’s no use in giving a laptop for a project like this to someone who nine-to-fives by using two or three applications. You’ve got to make the best of it, explore the boundaries and have this thing tested to the max. That’s exactly what I expect from someone like Tom. I think we’ll be cursing some more when Tom has a go on it, but in the end, it’ll benefit all users, and that’s exactly why we do this. Feedback, report, improve, update. A simple cycle to make life a little less hard.
Read Tom’s experiences at TomRafteryIT.net
