So the CT (Computer Telephony) Connect server stopped working on my NT Workstation. At first I wasn't getting any distributed data from one switch to another. (Distributed Application Data being a **big** deal for an Enterprise Call Center -- a call center with multiple locations. With it you can transfer a call from one call center to another call center and have the receiving call center get any data the sending call center attached to the call. Once you have that you can seamlessly have the current customer interaction transferred to the receiving agent so that you don't have to go through the interrogation part of the call again -- "what's your name, customer number, etc".)

All right, so I try to downgrade to a more stable version (we being a development user, get lots of intermediate patches that aren't fully tested, so sometimes the patches break other things -- CT Connect being a Dialogic, now part of Intel, product). Oops, the update program doesn't let you "patch" a newer version of the system (it's a simple program that just replaces every file in the bin directory with whatever is in the patch, whether or not it's a newer version). So I uninstall and reinstall a fresh copy of CTC (since then I've discovered that you can just go into the Windows Registry and change the version number of the application, so that the patch program will then not complain.)

That still doesn't work, which is strange since it was working before. I'm on a sort of tight deadline (which I missed because of what happened below) and I didn't have time to try to debug this. So I did the cleanest thing I could do: wipe out the hard drive and reinstall Windows NT. Now, this machine is a new (I got it like two months ago) Compaq Deskpro EN. But I wasn't thinking so I just used my Windows NT Workstation disk to reformat and reinstall. At this point I was at the Base NT 4 level.

Of course nothing worked. The display was 640x480 at 16 colors (quite large on a 21" monitor), the Ethernet NIC didn't initialize, even the floppy drive wasn't recognized. Think about this: no floppy, no network, only a CD drive. Bet you I don't have the Ethernet NIC on a CD. I can download it but how am I going to get it on my machine? But before that, what NIC did I have? Compaq's site is not that great about telling you what's installed on a particular model. Heck, the case didn't even tell me what model Deskpro EN I had (luckily I guessed correctly from the BIOS). And the drivers page for my model had like three different NIC software downloads, depending on what NIC you had. I'm so spoiled by the Mac OS. There was a point around here when I thought I'd throw in the towel and file a Service Request to reinstall my OS, but that would take our IT department a couple of days and I didn't want to explain what happened to my machine. So I was seemingly stuck.

But, I did have an NT4SP3 CD. Not really expecting anything to help, I installed the service pack and lo and behold, the floppy drive worked! At least now I could hump the driver over (though that meant fitting a 3 MB file onto floppies, this requires something like WinZip which we have a site license for). Install the driver and now Ethernet works! Ahh, use Internet Explorer to download the rest of the software. Oops, I only have IE 2 which doesn't support proxy servers. Luck is with me again because I have an IE 4 install CD and once that's installed I download the graphics driver and NT4SP6 and once again I have a running system.

Once again I install CTC and once again Call Data Transfer (another name for Distributed Application Data, when a field is relatively new everyone has different nomenclatures) doesn't work. Sigh. That was a lot of work for nothing, and I still had to reinstall all my other software. That I finally got done just before 22:00, so this took me like a day and a half to do. Something that should have been relatively easy I blew totally out of proportion and let it derail my life for a day.

Oh, and navigating the Microsoft is not much a picnic either. Their idea of software downloads is a big list of similarly named and described files, one or several of which you're supposed to pick to fix your problems. That's why you people invented Service Packs. I can't believe how many bugs there are -- it doesn't seem that bad for Apple (well, one reason is that it isn't that bad for Apple) because they release System Updates, so there is only one file to download, not a dozen. That's enough ranting for now.