The case of the mysterious stopping spooler has been solved. At least this time.

Good old Microsoft. You send in errors, look up errors and can not find anything from Microsoft itself. Half the time the people in the Technet Forums treat people with almost a snark to them, and don’t listen. Canned answers, no answers, and worst of all no information.

I recently had one of those spooler.exe keeps stopping problems. Went through all the logs, did my Internet searches and came up with an answer. c:\windows\system32\spooler\print needed to be cleaned out. Simple answer, which I found archived from a forum question about 4 years ago. Not an official Microsoft forums mind you, just a general IT forum.I find more things away from Microsoft than on their site.

It is frustrating. I am sure all of you have run into something similar. You look in the event logs and there is the “Click here for more information” link in the error message. Of course 99% of the time when you click on that link, the more information is sorry, we have no information on that error. The rest of the time it is just a general description that already has been stated inside the log entry.

Why does Microsoft tease us so? They have the perfect mechanism to help us, the ones who support their products, and yet they shun us. Yes there is a lot of other information out on the net, but sometimes you run into errors that you can’t find anyone else who has solved the error. Sometimes you want that information from Microsoft, without having to call them up and use an incident or pay for an incident. Last time I called up Microsoft, I had the problem figured out while on hold because the Microsoft Technician was asking for help. He couldn’t find information on the error codes.

Microsoft wants to be a big name in search. They have the perfect mechanism to help take Google down a peg with the links in the error log entries. Why they don’t get that working properly, I have no clue.

I read a fantastic article on Tech Republic about the CCIE certification and was it losing its value. There were points in the article brought up about getting the certification and getting experience.I wanted to touch on this a bit overall as it relates to many jobs and certifications in the IT world.

Its the age old catch 22. The IT professional studies for a certification, hoping he can move up in the field to a better paying job, or a section of the field she is more interested in, and has little experience in. Then they apply for the positions and get turned down due to lack of experience in that area. Next person comes in with experience in the area, but no certification, and they get turned down for the position also. Eventually the position goes to someone who has just a little bit of experience and a college degree, and that person proceeds to prove they have no clue what they are doing.

The world of IT jobs is a tough world to live in. You need the experience and the certifications, and the college degree to become close to being wanted. Most companies force us to go through HR departments which have no clue about the actual position, and go by pieces of paper. If you can get around that, then you have to deal with the real tech interview by someone in the department you are applying.

It sucks, and it makes life difficult. Those of us in lower paying jobs can’t afford to get equipment to practice on, and practicing on a client is frowned upon. So we study for the exams, we use the virtual labs, we do whatever we can to get the knowledge. Its too bad that the experience factor is so much more difficult. If you want a job you need the experience, but how do you get the experience without a job? I know I am still searching for an answer.

So here we are, a society that considers itself civilized. A society that has tons of issues. A society that loves clogging up the court system with litigation. You get litigation if you buy coffee at McDonald’s and spill it on yourself, if you are a 4 year old who hit an older lady while riding your bicycle, and especially if you try to make anything in the technology field.

I look at the lawsuits being brought out recently. Apple Sues Motorola, Motorola sues Apple, Microsoft sues Motorola, some company that bought a software patent sues major websites, and so on, and so on. Heck I’m waiting to see who is going to sue whom over what next.

With all the big companies suing each other, its no wonder that you don’t have much technological advancement anymore. You get repackaged versions of older ideas that work better cause of faster processing power. No real innovation, and this is I feel is due to 2 things. Patent trolling, and lack of entrepreneurial spirit.

Seriously, who wants to try to build new things when you can just keep making money off what you already have, and who wants to try to start up a new company, when virtually every method of doing anything is patented, and thereby a potential death by litigation for a small company.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There is a good reason to have patents, just like copyrights. The issue is the length of time they last for. At some point you need to reduce that amount of time back to something more normal, just so that we can innovate and move forward.  Of course, that is just my opinion.

Oh my god! The world is going to end! Better stock up on water, and essentials! The worst bug in the world is coming!

These sorts of doom warnings sound familiar? Well it was a part of the paranoia, and hype that was the Y2K bug. Yeah, most of the country and world were worried that Y2K would shut down so much, not realizing that most companies had been working on fixing Y2K problems for a few years prior.

Jump ahead to 2009. Cornficker, a worm that an Out-Of-Band patch from Microsoft would protect a machine from, and it was available back in October of 08. Lets see, that is 4-5 months that the patch has been around. No reason machines should not have been patched, but hey, a patch released not on normal patch Tuesday can not be that important, can it? Again the cure was there well in advance.

What does this mean? Well again ti shows the lack of understand of IT and computers, a world that people depend on. Yeah I”m being a little preachy, and yeah its interesting to see computer things make the mainstream news, but in all the wrong and misunderstood ways?  That does no one any good. Heck there are things such as court cases, patten cases, copyright cases, security breaches, and many other things that should be reported properly in mainstream media due to the fact that the world relies on computers. Instead our field is the bastard child, the one that no one cares about until everything goes wrong, or is at least perceived to go wrong.

Until things change about IT and how it is perceived, we will have another Y2K or Cornficker doom party soon.