Coping: Those Damn Bugs in Windows 10
George Ure's Urban Survival Blog
January 5, 2018
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[snip]

Communications: Forget Specter/Meltdown for a minute. And, if you’re a Mac, Android, or Linux user, stick around – you may get some jollies. Because this morning I’ll tell you the tale of tracking down a miserable bug in Windows 10 that I spent much of my “down time” working on over the holidays. Try 12-hours worth, to be exact. The “Meltdown” has been me.

Windows is a dandy operating system, don’t get me wrong. Still, the headlong rush of OS (operating system) designers to all jump onboard with the rollout of voice recognition systems feels as though some obvious bugs elsewhere in the code are still not fixed.

The story of how I found my Win10 bug – and fixed it – should be instructive for those still trying to run grown-up computers. It also explains by [WHY] Android and other simpler, phone-based systems, are so appealing.

Bud Description:

My problem began when I installed a new update to work with my Brother label printer. I have a label printer (in addition to the duplexing laser) because it’s a huge time-saver. Oh, and my writing is mostly illegible. The more education, the worse the writing got.

The Brother label printer comes with something called P-Touch software. I was simply going from version 5.1-something to 5.2-something. It had been a while and it was part of my systematic clean-up work to get ready for some serious website development work.

At this point, though, before Christmas, I didn’t know I had a problem…

I installed the update and everything was fine. Until, that is, I loaded up the maze of spreadsheets that our ChartPack in the Peoplenomics reports comes from. This adventure started the Wednesday before Christmas weekend.

A day or two passed before I discovered the problem: Suddenly, all the charts in Excel looked like incomprehensible little boxes of goo. Gone were all the charts.

The simplest solution was to recover to the most recent Restore Point. Which took a fair bit of time.

Once done, the charts came back.

Except now, the new P-Touch labeler was wonky so I decided to take it off and reinstall. Using Revo Uninstaller (great program, marvelous for this kind of work), I got P-Touch off and put it back on. The problem of bad charts came back.

No problem…I had the old version of P-Touch another hard drive (H:) [I have lots of drives] so off came 5.2 – again.

You know what I was thinking, right?

“No problem – I will just do a restore point restore and back in business in no time….” Or, so I thought….