Windows World

For the last 2 years, I've been using Linux almost exclusively on my computers. I still have a Windows XP virtual machine for Igor Pro, which is software we use in my research group for data analysis and plotting (it runs reasonably well under Wine, but there are enough minor irritating bugs that I'd rather run it on Windows. I've also tried QtiPlot, but I haven't had the time to learn it well enough to replace Igor). But unfortunately, in the laboratory, our computers all run Windows. That's because in the early days of our group, when data acquisition software was being written, they did everything on Windows and in a platform-specific way. So I still have to revisit the world of Windows in the laboratory.

Today I came to the realization that my Windows IQ has dropped substantially since I quit using it a couple years ago. I received a piece of software from a company to operate a temperature controller from a computer. I installed the software, but when I tried to run the software, I got an error message about having the wrong version of a dll file. I assumed that the company had shipped the wrong version, and so I contacted them about it. They got back with me this morning and told me that their engineers had a solution: reboot, uninstall, and reinstall the software. Sure enough, that did the trick, and now the software works. It's been so long since I've needed to do such things to get a piece of software to work that it didn't even occur to me to try those things....