The Dodge

“When logic and reason fail you, use the dodge”

Windows is about reinstalling, dialog boxes, licensing and doing the dodge.

I have in my time at the PA hospital required in several cases to trick Windows into accepting a program or data. I detail the “worst” case of dodging below:

For those who have had to use Access in a multiwindowsversion environment, you will no doubt know of the inherent lameness of Access when it comes to external function references namely the $date function. Well I was having terrific trouble with a particular commercial (and therefore uneditable, unthinkable and unfixable) database. I tried everything. Windows 98, Windows 2000, different versions of Office, different combinations of office installed components, applying service packs, not applying service packs, eating an apple. Desperately trying to emulate the computers which had this particular DB working, but all to no avail.

It was then I realised that I was being far to logical. For I was trying to get one windows machine to emulate the other by installing programs. Since the orthodox method had bit the concrete with vengeance, I turned to a more unorthodox one (although gaining in popularity) The Dodge.

Now alas I was soon to find out that Windows 2000 was infact Dodge proof, however on testing Windows 98 after a few convulsions bounced back nicely. What did I do? Well quite simply, I dumped (using Ghost) the contents of the computer’s HDD that I was trying to match onto the offending machine, sacrificed a goat, and booted it up. Windows 2000 alas is very brittle and didn’t get very far into the loading, Windows 98 however booted fine, chucked a spaz about all the drivers on the machine, rebooted about four times but then was fine. Now this machine is working perfectally. And everything is already installed and it only took me about 20 min. If only I had turned to The Dodge instead of relying on silly logic for the best part of half a day.

This isn’t a singleton case either, I have personally resorted to a variant of the Dodge several times in the past. In this particular case, I had the data for a program (MSSQL) but the program didn’t want to take it. So the Dodge variant was applied – an new empty file of the same name was created. Then I replaced it with the correct data, and jump started the program – all with a 100% success rate.

Next time, when working with windows, I shall endeavour to waste less time on logical thinking :)

Will.