January 28, 2011

Useless error messages

Last couple three times I tried to get Deneb (the Windows Home Server) to do updates, it came back and told me it couldn't do so right now. If the problem persists, please reboot the server.

So I did, and it didn't help. Then it occurred to me that I hadn't updated the DNS settings for Deneb, so it was still trying to use the DNS's in New Jersey that don't exist any longer.

Why didn't it tell me that it was having problems contacting the DNS? Wouldn't that have been a more specific, and more helpful, error message than just "It don't woik. Try later."?

UPDATE: Of course, this doesn't rate compared to the all-time greatest useless error message, from the original PC BIOS:

"Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue."

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 09:58 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 135 words, total size 1 kb.

1 Reminds me of the nightmare I had upgrading my HD.  Somehow I ended up booting from the new drive and with the pagefile on the old drive.  After I removed the old HD, Windows failed gracelessly (You'd think it could create a new pagefile.).  At one point it got into a state of playing the opening and closing music back to back endlessly.

Posted by: Mauser at January 29, 2011 03:17 AM (cZPoz)

2 I always took the "F1 to continue" to imply "once you've fixed the missing keyboard we can continue on our merry way. You can let me know you've fixed the missing keyboard by pressing F1 on it."

Posted by: bkw at January 29, 2011 11:49 AM (34O+x)

3 A year or so ago, I was trying to install the game Borderlands on a Vista machine when it popped up a window saying something to the tune of "The Application has encountered an error and is quitting. Please contact customer support." Even the installer's log file gave no information on WTF was going on. (the file recored everything prior to the error, but not the error itself.)

Posted by: Kae Arby at January 29, 2011 01:23 PM (CdGyG)

4 Actually, wasn't the keyboard error message kind of good? In the event that it was caused by erroneous detection, you just had to press a button and you were demonstrating that yes, there's a keyboard plugged into the computer and working. If the keyboard was truly not working, for whatever reason, you couldn't continue until you resolved that problem.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at January 29, 2011 05:03 PM (mRjOr)

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