On Mon, 2022-07-11 at 14:33 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
I always wondered about that "reinstall the software" thing.
I mean, how much should I trust software from someone who apparently is unable to just copy the software onto the disk?
And even worse, it actually works sometimes.
I'd come to a few conclusions regarding that:
Silent disk errors. Things disappeared without notice while writing, and/or later on. And checkdisk was fond of just deleting files it considered faulty.
Mangling of files read from disk. When you open a file, a file system can record when the file was last accessed. So what happens when it pokes the data on a file and has a crash? Can it destroy the file? (We're talking self-destructive MS file systems, here.) Why else should some .dll file disappear that *you* never had interaction with.
Race conditions. Some programming flaw got in the way of some write during installation, that didn't happen during the re-installation. Although that doesn't take into account things that worked, later failed, then got fixed by a reinstall.