Tausende IT-Profis lei­den unter prekären Arbeitsverhältnissen. Jetzt gibt es einen Ausweg.

Gunter Dueck held an intox­i­cat­ing speech about rev­o­lu­tion­ary tech­nol­ogy and econ­omy at next08 con­fer­ence. He places empha­sis on how to pre­pare the ground for inno­va­tions to become a mar­ket suc­cess and show how wrong are all these geeks from Skype & Co. are — but only because of their tim­ing. Have fun!

Watch Gunter Dueck’s speech (in Ger­man) at Sin­ner­Schrader’s next08 conference.

This issue took me a whole week to fig­ure it out: It all started when I down­loaded a file from the web to my desk­top using Fire­fox. Dur­ing the down­load the Explorer (not the Inter­net Explorer) “stopped work­ing” (that was the mes­sage Vista gave me) and was restarted by the sys­tem. I thought “Ok — restart it and let me go on work­ing.”, but sadly enough that wasn’t pos­si­ble. The Explorer stopped work­ing again, imme­di­ately after it was restarted and the sys­tem killed it again. That went on in an end­less loop and I had to man­u­ally kill the Explorer using the Taskman­ager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC).

After killing the Explorer I started a shell (Taskman­ager -> New Task -> cmd) to regain con­trol and to be able to start some pro­grams. First thing to do was a sys­tem file scan (sfc /scannow) — but as you mght have guessed that didn’t find any prob­lems. Next stop on my way to get­ting the machine back to work was the Win­dows Sys­tem Restore func­tion that is avail­able from the con­trol panel (Shell -> con­trol) or by start­ing from the orig­i­nal Vista-DVD. I went back four restore points — that killed my graph­ics dri­ver, but the Explorer.…argh!

Every six months the ger­man com­puter mag­a­zine “c’t” has some kind of secu­rity CD add-on with a Linux that boots directly from CD and some virus scan­ners that can also scan Win­dows’ NTFS dri­ves. My com­puter had enough time dur­ing the night for scan­ning… and found nothing!

The usual steps didn’t work, so let’s fire up Fire­fox a ask the web. I really found sev­eral post­ings about end­lessly crash­ing Explor­ers on Vista and those where pro­duced by some mal­ware. For those ugly things Spy­Bot is my tool of choice, but it also didn’t find anything.

I fur­ther searched the web and tried sev­eral things out, but wasn’t suc­cess­ful and really got frus­trated, as it took sev­eral days and my com­puter wasn’t really use­able dur­ing that time.

What I never noticed was the left­over part of the aborted down­load on my desk­top! And that finally was the solu­tion. After remov­ing the file (Shell -> cd /Users//Desktop -> del ) and restart­ing the explorer (Shell -> explorer) every­thing worked fine again (except my graph­ics driver…).

A really can’t under­stand why Vista can’t han­dle this more nicely.