Does HP do this on purpose? I don’t know if HP just likes to reinvent the wheel or what, but this just seems crazy. But let’s back up a bit before I go on any further…

I was at my brother-in-law’s house tonight and I was “privileged” to take on the role of family IT guy. What that meant tonight was diagnosing “Active Desktop disabled” errors along with random blue-screenedness. After a little investigating and some scrounging through the event logs, I saw that some services failing to start and other weird errors, so we decided it was time to wipe the slate, or in this case drive, clean.

So we backed up the stuff from his laptop (since no one ever backs up) and popped in the Windows XP install CD (this was back when HP actually gave you CDs). I reformatted the drive, reinstalled Windows and then moved on to the driver CDs. These are the custom gems provided by HP to return your laptop to the tip top amount of crapware that is on them by default. After the second driver CD, I was presented with this:

Um… huh? Ok… so I have the choice of both restarting my computer now and not restarting now? So I click on the restart later checkbox and now only the restart later checkbox is checked. I click on the restart now checkbox just to make sure and again only the restart now checkbox is checked. Hm… how come this smells like another control I so often encounter?

I’ve already talked about my previous dealings with HP software and them using the wrong controls at the wrong time. Here is yet another instance. This leaves me with a couple thoughts neither of which are very uplifting. Either the programmer at HP didn’t know about radio buttons and so reinvented the wheel by using exclusive OR checkboxes, or he did know about radio buttons but choose not to use them. Talk about a case of “Not Invented Here” syndrome. What gets me is even if the original programmer didn’t know to use radio buttons, do they not do peer reviews? or testing? Did these dialogs not get looked at by anyone else down the line? I’m just amazed that this slipped through the cracks.

But for whatever reason it was, this managed to get released as is. Whether because of the programmer, project manager or whatever force it was, this is how it is. But no matter what the reason, it’s not good…