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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Stupid software
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Comcast decided that there wouldn't be internet service today. Which is mostly not a problem, because we are having a party this afternoon. In the meantime, my wife wanted to print out a grocery list. But nooo - just in case I thought Word was extra stupid, WordPerfect is here to show me a deeper level of insanity - the printserver that is part of WP fails if there's no network connection - even though all I want to do is print to the local printer. Gah!
Ok, so we save the file in RTF to a shared drive - the idea being that I'll pick it up and print from my notebook using Word. Sounds simple, right? All I want to do is grab a file from the local LAN - I have no need to see the internet. Windows networking seems to think differently. Even though I'm only browsing a shared drive on a local PC, each directory navigation is taking something like 60 seconds to navigate - apparently, some deeply stupid part of Windows networking is trying to do a WAN lookup as a navigate the local LAN. It's not just a simple socket timeout thing either - it's taking way too long for that.
I think the problem is that Windows thinks there's a WAN connection, because it was there when Windows booted. I see this in BottomFeeder on Windows - if I bring it up without there having been a network connection, any socket connections time out instantly - whereas they take 20 seconds each if the connection was there and dropped. This is far, far worse though - Windows networking is taking minutes to navigate from directory to directory on the local LAN, when it shouldn't even care about a WAN connection.
The befuddling part is that LAN access from my wife's machine was normal speed - so I was finally able to grab the document by pushing it from her end. Utterly baffling - I have no idea why that should be....
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