ForceWare WTF



  • So I noticed the other day that a new version of the Nvidia ForceWare drivers had been released. In the vain hope that these would improve performance under Vista (but that is a subject for another topic), I downloaded them and ran the installer. It told me to close all open programs (I did), then it uninstalled my old drivers, then asked me whether to restart now or later.

    Wtf? You removed my display drivers! I'm stuck in 800x600, with 16-bit colours, no Aero and huge text. What the hell do you expect me to be able to do, other than restarting?

    So I clicked Yes. It restarted, installed the drivers, then said the drivers would take effect after restarting, then asked me whether to restart now or later.

    Wtf? I'm still stuck in 800x600, with 16-bit colours, no Aero and huge text until I restart. Even better, the installer hadn't actually given me any opportunity to run or do anything else after the first restart. What could I possibly have done that would have made it a good idea not to restart?

    After restarting again, all was well. Still, I'm glad I hadn't walked away from the computer during installation, because these two stupid dialogs plus the other dialog that popped up after the first restart to ask me if I wanted to continue (thanks for asking a second time, after you've uninstalled my display drivers no less) prevented me from doing anything else away from the computer.

    I can understand asking the user some relevant questions during installation, but making me sit there and watch a progress bar move and Windows restart just so I can click Continue > Continue > Continue when asked??

    (Then I realised I'd installed the English version on a Dutch system, so I went through the whole deal again to install the Dutch language version, and Windows threw an error halfway during installation saying Age of Empires II (?!!) is not compatible and it had aborted the installation. Wtf? I don't even have Age of Empires II. I ended up having to reinstall the English version. Tested much, Nvidia?)



  • Good thing you don't run a secure system... then you'd have to re-log in every time the install asked you to reboot...

    That'd be a pain.



  • But would you still complain if it rebooted without asking first?



  • @capnPedro said:

    But would you still complain if it rebooted without asking first?

    Exactly. No matter what you do, someone will always complain.



  • @capnPedro said:

    But would you still complain if it rebooted without asking first?

    I can understand the idea behind the first restart question: people tend to ignore the 'please close all open programs' prompt, because pretty much any installer will tell you that, even if it makes no difference. It also appeared almost immediately after launching the installer and continuing past the first welcome screen, which is good. It was the only dialog that actually made sense, and it came quickly.

    This means it would have been a pretty much unattended install from there, if not for the completely useless welcome/continue screen a few minutes later, then the equally useless second reboot question another few minutes later. If I did not want to install the drivers, I would have clicked cancel the first time, about five minutes earlier; or I would have aborted the installation. And the second reboot question is just pointless because you cannot actually... uh... do anything between the two reboots (modal installer window that fills the screen in 800x600).

    Say about Windows what you will, at least MS is clever enough to ask the questions first, then handle the install automatically. Even Win95 didn't ask permission to reboot during installation, and god knows how many times I've had to reinstall that.



  • @capnPedro said:

    But would you still complain if it rebooted without asking first?

    use the OS X aproach:

     "This system will shut down in 2 minutes unless you click the abort button", with two buttons "Abort" and "Shutdown now".

    You can walk away and let the install run unattended if you closed everything anyways, and if you want it to not reboot, you can have that too
     



  • use the Linux approach: "don't need no stinkin' reboot".

    Just run the shar... it compiles, unloads the current driver, loads the new one... done.

    yrldmbtd (your retarded linux distribution may beg to differ)
     



  • @powertool said:

    use the Linux approach: "don't need no stinkin' reboot".
    Linux developers hate rebooting so much that even after a kernel update, Ubuntu said nothing about rebooting. Then a power failure caused a restart, which caused the Nvidia driver to stopped working. I couldn't find the installer, so I had to edit xorg.conf to change the driver to nv, startx, download the installer, get out of X, run the installer, and startx again.

    @powertool said:

    Just run the shar... it compiles, unloads the current driver, loads the new one... done.
    All from the infinite comfort of the command line. (BTW, what is a "shar"?)



  • @HeroreV said:

    @powertool said:
    use the Linux approach: "don't need no stinkin' reboot".
    Linux developers hate rebooting so much that even after a kernel update, Ubuntu said nothing about rebooting. Then a power failure caused a restart, which caused the Nvidia driver to stopped working. I couldn't find the installer, so I had to edit xorg.conf to change the driver to nv, startx, download the installer, get out of X, run the installer, and startx again.

    @powertool said:

    Just run the shar... it compiles, unloads the current driver, loads the new one... done.
    All from the infinite comfort of the command line. (BTW, what is a "shar"?)

    a) Yes, the command line is very comfortable, isn't it?

     b) shar = shell archive, Linux equivalent of a self-extracting exe. Since the archive itself is executable, you don't actually need to run it from the command line.
     



  • @halcyon said:

    @capnPedro said:

    But would you still complain if it rebooted without asking first?

    use the OS X aproach:

     "This system will shut down in 2 minutes unless you click the abort button", with two buttons "Abort" and "Shutdown now".

    You can walk away and let the install run unattended if you closed everything anyways, and if you want it to not reboot, you can have that too
     

    Vista actually appears to have implemented this approach as well. I set my computer to download updates, and walked away for a few minutes. When I came back, a dialog was on the screen counting down from 5 minutes, saying something to the effect of "You need to reboot for updates to take effect. The computer will restart in 5 minutes unless you click the 'restart later' button", and a pair of buttons, one marked "restart now" and the other "restart later"



  • @HeroreV said:

    Linux developers hate rebooting so much that even after a kernel update, Ubuntu said nothing about rebooting. Then a power failure caused a restart, which caused the Nvidia driver to stopped working. I couldn't find the installer, so I had to edit xorg.conf to change the driver to nv, startx, download the installer, get out of X, run the installer, and startx again.

     

    Sorry, but you installed the NVidia driver the wrong way.

    Had you installed it via apt-get (package name is nvidia-glx if I'm not mistaken) it would be updated every time the kernel was updated.



  • @Volmarias said:

    Vista actually appears to have implemented this approach as well. I set my computer to download updates, and walked away for a few minutes. When I came back, a dialog was on the screen counting down from 5 minutes, saying something to the effect of "You need to reboot for updates to take effect. The computer will restart in 5 minutes unless you click the 'restart later' button", and a pair of buttons, one marked "restart now" and the other "restart later"
    I've seen that in XP and 2000, too, once or twice, but the countdown was 1 minute (and really annoying, since the countdown appeared without any warnings also on machines with automatic updates disabled). IIRC, there was only a Cancel button though.



  • @ender said:

    @Volmarias said:
    Vista actually appears to have implemented this approach as well. I set my computer to download updates, and walked away for a few minutes. When I came back, a dialog was on the screen counting down from 5 minutes, saying something to the effect of "You need to reboot for updates to take effect. The computer will restart in 5 minutes unless you click the 'restart later' button", and a pair of buttons, one marked "restart now" and the other "restart later"
    I've seen that in XP and 2000, too, once or twice, but the countdown was 1 minute (and really annoying, since the countdown appeared without any warnings also on machines with automatic updates disabled). IIRC, there was only a Cancel button though.

    I distinctly recall that some of the updates for 2k and XP had one of these things without a cancel button - so if you had anything important running, you had to scramble to sort it out (unless you were sufficiently alert to kill the installer process from the task manager).



  • From good ol' bash.org... 

    <TMX> someone write a shell extension for windows xp
    <Cow> for what?
    <TMX> a stfu button
    <TMX> equivalent tokilling a process via ctrl-alt-delete
    <TMX> For retarded programs like norton that just have an "ok" button when they ask to reboot
    <TMX> +----------------------------------------+
    <TMX> |& M$ Piss-me-off XP            |_|| ||X||
    <TMX> +----------------------------------------+
    <TMX> | Your computer needs to be rebooted in  |
    <TMX> | order to apply the updates.            |
    <TMX> |                                        |
    <TMX> | Save your work, and then click ok.     |
    <TMX> |                                        |
    <TMX> |       +----------+ +----------+        |
    <TMX> |       |    OK    | |   STFU   |        |
    <TMX> |       +----------+ +----------+        |
    <TMX> +----------------------------------------+


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