VPN, Win7, and not seeing the LAN computers

Here's another one of those mystical computer problems that (at least) one wonderful genius found a solution to that defies explanation as to how he figgered it out.

Problem: I VPN in to work but for some reason cannot see what used to be called the "Network Neighborhood".  Basically, if there's a file on the network that I need I can't click on the link to get to it.

Search:  Turns out I can use the IP address in an explorer window to see the contents, but hell if I'm going to look up every IP address that I need.  It logically leads to a lot of guesswork on the nets looking for a solution that involves network settings, DNS, configs, and even domains and workgroups.  Most threads of which drop off without a satisfactory answer and an occasional "works for me"

Solution: Then I found this lonely page quite apart from the other threads in content and direction but which did the trick.  How the hell are we supposed to know that something called TCP Auto-tuning would be the culprit?

solution copied here for future reference:

Disable TCP Auto-Tuning
1.Open elevated command prompt with administrator’s privileges.
2.Type the following command and press Enter:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled
Enable TCP Auto-Tuning
1.Open elevated command prompt with administrator’s privileges.
2.Type the following command and press Enter:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=normal

Reboot-itis

I almost popped a vein the other day with Windows 7 again.  It drives me NUTS that it will auto-reboot (post-update) without your permission and no matter what you have running.  In fact, I find that policy downright unprofessional.  I know they think it's to "protect" the users and perhaps for the vast majority of them maybe there is some benefit; benefit as much to Microsoft as to the user.  You see, if they step in as if they were you're IT department forcing you to do it their way for you're own good without choice and in the process manage to actually cut down on exploits and infections, then in the public eye Windows looks good even if they do it in a big brother fashion. 

But at least have the decency to let us turn that bloody "feature" off with a simple option click.  And I don't mean "Turn off auto-updates" because then you'll just be nagged.  And I don't mean scour Google for registry hacks and third party software that sometimes does the trick but sometimes not.  I mean an honest to goodness checkbox that says "don't reboot automatically until I say so".  Not only do some of us not need it, but it actually interferes with us.  My sis sometimes needs to work remotely from her main home machine when she's away and she's completely fucked if her machine decides to reboot and she's not around to turn it back on and run the proper software.  Poor thing has had to call relatives to break into her home to turn it back on.  And the answer should not be "oh she should install x, y, z, buy u, v, w and edit o, p, q to have l, m, n started upon boot and ...".  She's not an IT professional.  The simple answer is "Don't shutdown without my permission!", nag me about it later if you must.

While I'm at it... 20 years later and you still need to reboot for what feels like every little freaking thing.  A driver here, a service there, registry setup change over yonder.  What is it about the system that makes it impossible to just stop-service start-service restart-service and once identified to FIX IT? 

(Granted, it's gotten a lot better and it's not always their fault)

Fear of the upgrade

There was a time when I would constantly upgrade to the latest version of software. I was a junky for new useless features. There was sometimes a secondary reason, like keeping certain file types up to date (due to the unfortunately still present but thankfully diminishing days of proprietary file formats). That changed as the years passed. I now find myself skeptical of upgrades. Oddly, the inevitable increase in bloat (both in size increase and speed decrease) is less the reason than the problems that invariably get introduced. It seems that these days an upgrade signifies an introduced incompatibility, instability, or worse.

Off the top of my head the first program that I purposefully abandoned upgrading (versus just didn't need to use anymore) was PaintShopPro, from back in the early 90s. It was freeware or shareware then. It was small, fast, and useful. Then at some point the upgrade was no longer free to get. It became around $30 and later $100. I kept the old free version around for many years and refused many upgrades. Eventually I abandoned it for other things, but I still remember liking it a lot. A copy may be lying around on a disk somewhere.

Another example is MusicMatch. It was one of the first decent mp3 ripper-players around. I was fond of it not as much because of its real quality (it was good but kind of clumsy in some ways), but rather because the owners did something absolutely right: free lifetime upgrades. Now that policy deserved my money. I despise being forced to buy essentially the same software over and over again every year or two. For every software purchase, there should be at least 2 free major upgrades or like 4 years of upgrades included. But lifetime? that was awesome. Then Yahoo bought it, but I remained pleased because at least they still honored the lifetime upgrade. I saw an end to that coming when they changed the name to Yahoo Jukebox. Eventually it was unrecognizable as MusicMatch. And eventually, I stopped installing it and even stopped using the old version. Why? because I upgraded once too often and it kept pestering me to upgrade, and then gave me a stern warning that my version's days were numbered due to an interface change (basically a forced connection with Yahoo Music that I didn't want). Oh well.

Apple software gets my goat because I'm convinced they purposely break something just to keep things more proprietary. e.g. every new version of iPod firmware seems to be designed to break other peoples attempts at using their product not in the "vision" of Apple. iTunes is similar, only every major update seems to cause my iTunes to stop working properly. My new rule is to wait two updates minimum before updating.

These are kind of trite examples. The major one is Windows. Now there's an important piece of software that they force you to re-buy every couple years whether you like it or not. My latest excursion, I got a laptop last year that had ONLY Vista as an option. Of course a month after I got it the backlash forced Dell to offer an XP version. I stuck with Vista though because I didn't want to buy another copy of XP and also I'm lazy. I admit that it has some added niceties, mostly trivial in my opinion, but DEAR LORD IS IT ANNOYING. It has never stopped pestering me for something or other whenever I boot. I'm always getting these damned bubbles popping up in the corner, especially annoying when I'm playing WoW. Every major piece of software wants to put crap in my taskbar and wants to poll for updates and yadda yadda. Windows of course is the second worse offender (first being McAfee), especially with its constant "are you sure", "do you want to allow this", etc. It drives me nuts. The real issue here though is stuff just doesn't work cleanly in it that worked fine on my XP box. Even stuff that's certified for Vista in some way encounters problems.

As if that wasn't bad enough, along comes SP1. After some pestering, I allowed the update. And wouldn't you know, iTunes won't run. I was getting a "iTunes has stopped working" message before even the window popped up. Dangit, I wanted to swap in some stuff onto my nano NOW. I spend a couple hours scouring the interwebs for some solution and even tried the ol' uninstall and reinstall. The searches were kind of scary with all the notes on how iTunes and Vista were problematic from the get-go; I felt lucky that I got it to work at all. It took me a while to get the right incantation of the Google search to get me to this link which at least one solid and tangible solution to try. I downloaded the noted patches but turns out I didn't need them. For the benefit of the search engines: the trick that worked was Control_Panel -> Programs_and_Features -> Quicktime -> Repair. It runs now and thankfully even though I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes, my library info remained intact. A miracle I know. Sigh, I really wish I didn't HAVE to use iTunes... but it's the only iPod compatible program I'm aware of that supports the "resume playback where you left off" (or "save played position") feature that I need for audiobooks and podcasts. That's the critical deal-breaking feature.

Backing up to the upgrade subject, I do not sport this upgrade fear on Linux. Maybe it's because nearly everything I use on Linux is below version 3 with a non-trivial chunk of it below version 1. This basically means that most of it can still be a bit unpolished and upgrades are welcome. But there's also this sense that when it comes to open-source software, it really feels like the upgrades are needed somehow. Most updates really are bug fixes and often times optimizations. When new features are added, it's as if by committee it was decided that the new feature really was a good idea. Another related reason might be the tendency that when some piece of software gets old -- like versioning past 3 to 4 but often much sooner -- that by then something else similar but cooler comes out and people move to that even when it's in alpha. Yes, upgrading and changing and tweaking seem natural in the Linux world, but it works because you don't have to pay for each update and it's often not even required. Sigh... it always feels like I'm just on the cusp of going completely Linux, but for the durned expectation that everyone uses Windows and may only make drivers and software compatible with Linux as an afterthought, maybe.