Windows XP SP3 CD Won't Boot

I was trying to install Windows XP on a Compaq Presario CQ60-420US laptop. I had just gotten it back from HP service in Texas, where they supposedly replaced the motherboard to fix a nonworking wired network interface card (NIC). They had reinstalled Vista on it, which I thought was very nice of them, and now the NIC still did not work for purposes of accessing the Internet, but did work for half of a crossover cable connection with another computer. That is, the other computer could access the laptop, but not vice versa.

So I had decided to try to see if WinXP would fare better than Vista on these problems. I wiped out the Vista partition, used GParted to create a new partition, and stuck the WinXP installation CD into the CD drive. Unfortunately, XP would not boot from the CD. GParted had just booted from the CD, so I was pretty sure it wasn’t the drive hardware per se. With the WinXP CD inserted, the computer would recognize that there was a CD in its drive, and would say, “Press any key to boot from CD,” but this just caused the thing to grind away, apparently trying to read and act upon the information on the CD, before eventually (after maybe five minutes) giving me a BSOD (blue screen of death).

I found that this problem occurred with a WinXP CD, containing slipstreamed SP3, that I had used to install XP on another computer; but it appeared somewhat different with an SP2 XP CD.   With that CD, the system went all the way through "Setup is loading files" and said, "Setup is starting Windows" before giving me the BSOD.  Then again, this may have been what was happening when the SP3 CD was grinding away; perhaps it was just not reporting all of the drivers it was loading.

To fix this, one suggestion said to disable BIOS virus detection. But the BIOS did not have a virus detection option. Someone else said laptop CDs are not eager to boot from DVDs, but this was definitely WinXP on a CD.

The BIOS Setup seemed willing to let me try to boot from a USB drive. I wondered if I could install WinXP from a 4GB USB jump drive that I had lying around. To try it, I rearranged the Boot Order so that USB Diskette on Key / USB Hard Drive came first. I wasn’t too sure how to do the rest of this process, so I started by just copying the WinXP CD directly to a 4GB USB drive. While that was underway, I researched the question and found that there were many websites on how to do this, and all of them sounded complicated.

At the same time, I continued trying to figure out what was wrong with the laptop’s DVD drive. One source said that they solved the problem by flashing the BIOS on the laptop. This seemed like a more comprehensive kind of solution, so I decided to try this second – right after inserting the USB drive with a copy of the Windows XP CD and verifying that, no, it wouldn’t install WinXP by itself; booting from that USB drive would just give me “Invalid system disk. Replace the disk, and then press any key.”

It seemed odd that the system would boot a Vista CD but would require a BIOS update in order to boot a WinXP CD.  Or at least it had booted a Vista installation CD previously.  I decided to try that again.  Sure enough, with the Vista installation CD inserted, I got “Press any key to boot from CD or DVD” and then “Windows is loading files.”  I thought about trying to slipstream Vista into a WinXP CD, but got some warnings that maybe this would not be a good idea.

So, continuing with the current plan, I went to the HP-Compaq download page and looked for a WinXP BIOS update for this laptop.  All I saw there was a firmware update named sp43474.exe, for the GSA-T50L optical drive, dated April 2009.  Firefox 3.5.8 wouldn’t download it to my other computer; I had to right-click and use the IE View extension to download successfully.  The problem now was that this update was an .exe file, which I would only be able to install from within a running Windows installation.  Catch-22!

Just to be sure, I double-clicked on the sp43474.exe file on the other computer.  It said, “This software update will upgrade the firmware of your system’s optical drive GSA-T50L to rev SC05.”  I had done a printout to PDF from a system information utility before sending the laptop to Texas, so now I searched it for a reference to this model of DVD drive.  It said that, actually, what I had (at least before sending the laptop to Texas) was an Optiarc DVD RW AD-7561S ATA Device.  This seemed to be made by Sony, whereas the GSA-T50L was made by LG.  I supposed that both might ultimately have been made by the same Chinese sweatshop somewhere, but I preferred to try to find a driver for the Optiarc.  But I was curious why my laptop would have an unofficial CD drive.  I was not able to find any references to the Sony Optiarc AD-7561S drive on the Sony Optiarc page, so apparently it was an older or in some sense unsupported model.  I stumbled across a recent thread in which someone else was tired of hassling with HP, couldn’t find a firmware update, and was at the point of just installing the wrong update to see what would happen.  Same problem in another thread.  I even found a thread on an official HP forum where they were talking about this problem.  As one participant in that last thread said, “There does not seem to be any updates for the 7561s at all.”  So, OK, updating the firmware was not an option; the more likely option was to send the machine back to HP for a replacement, assuming they were willing.  I couldn’t do that now -- I needed the laptop -- so we were back at the option of installing XP from the USB.  I went through a long effort of that nature, but ultimately abandoned it and came back to this post.

While that long effort was underway, I began looking into other possibilities.  One was to adapt an Acronis True Image backup (or you could try Macrium for freeware) of a Windows XP installation from another machine, so that it would work on this laptop's different hardware.  The Acronis option that I would need, to avoid a BSOD, seemed to be Universal Restore, which would apparently cost at least $365 (list).  Alternately, it seemed that OEMs use Sysprep to deploy the same operating system installation on many computers, but it looked like more hassle than it would be worth for just one system.  I also looked into the possibility of installing XP via network connection.  This led me to a site that specialized in boot disks.  I didn’t see how I could use any of that, unfortunately -- at least not without a substantial additional time commitment, which was impossible.

The effort to install XP from the USB did not pan out, so at this point I returned to this post.  There seemed to be two basic options.  Either find a way to develop or adapt an Acronis image from another machine so that it would work on the laptop, or get to a command prompt (via USB drive, network connection, or otherwise) and run an installation command (seemingly something like X:\i386\winnt /s:X:\i386, where the /S switch defines the location of the startup files) to install WinXP from scratch.

I wondered if (a) Windows updates were being designed and revised to defeat the Acronis approach and (b) it would be possible to bail out of a WinXP basic installation before installing many hardware drivers, and make an Acronis image at that point.  I tried that, but WinXP would crash almost immediately; and as with other efforts, it would not boot into Safe Mode either.  I figured that putting the Acronis image on the laptop would at least have installed the I386 folder there, so now maybe it was just a question of getting to a command prompt.  I didn't need BartPE on a USB stick for that; I could boot BartPE from a CD.  I had a CD version of BartPE from 2007.  I guessed it would probably work, since XP was much older than that.  But it seemed that whatever caused the laptop to crash when I had the WinXP CD inserted was also going to reject WinXP as part of a BartPE CD.

I also had an Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD4Win).  The UBCD ground away for a long time, eventually showed me the WinXP splash screen -- and didn't crash!  Instead, it gave me a choice, "Select shell to start." It still seemed to be in its process, so I waited, and it chose the automatic option for me.  It gave me an option of setting up networking, but I didn't know how to answer the question as to which sort.  I tried to cancel, but it seemed intent upon continuing, so I just used the default options.  I went to Start > Command Prompt and typed DIR C: (using capital letters here just to indicate the actual command; DOS is not case-specific) and, no, the I386 folder was actually not installed there yet.  I put the WinXP CD in the CD drive and typed DIR X: because it looked like X was the letter that UBCD had assigned to the CD drive.  I typed COPY X:\I386 C:\ and it copied files.  Then it froze.  I killed that window and tried running Start > Programs > File Management > Explorers.  None of the explorer programs would run.  Eventually I realized this was because I had removed the UBCD disc.  I put it back in and tried again.  The explorers still didn't work.  I had belatedly realized that COPY was probably not the best command, so I tried XCOPY X:\I386 C:\I386 /E /H /Y.  It copied lots of stuff, and not the way I intended.  Now all the stuff that should have been in the C:\I386 folder was instead in the root (C:\) folder.  Oops.  I wound up deleting it all and starting over.  There were just a few files in C:\ that I couldn't delete (i.e., biosinfo.inf, bootfix.bin, config.sys, and mstask.inf), and of course several folders (i.e., Documents and Settings, I386, Program Files, and Windows).  Problem:  there was no WINNT.EXE file to be found.  On my other computer, it was in C:\I386, but it was not in that folder on either the laptop or the WinXP CD.  I carried it over via jump drive.  It took UBCD a minute to recognize the jump drive, but it did.  I typed WINNT.EXE and hit Enter.  I got this:

Windows XP Setup

This program does not run on any 32-bit version of Windows.

Use WINNT32.EXE instead.

Setup cannot continue.  Press ENTER to exit.

So, OK, I jumped WINNT32*.* over to C:\I386.  (The USB flash drive was recognized as drive G, as I discovered by feeling around.  That is, I tried D: and got a partition; tried E: and got a partition; tried F: and got an error; tried G: anyway and there it was.)  But it froze.  It would copy the WINNT32.* files, but not the WINNT32*.DLL files, not even one at a time.  I tried running C:\I386\WINNT32.EXE anyway.  It gave me an error:

The file C:\I386\WINNT32U.DLL could not be loaded or is corrupt.  Setup cannot continue.

I didn't have that particular one on the jump drive, so I went back to the source machine and tried to jump it over.  But I got the same problem:  the command window froze and had to be killed.  I rebooted the computer with an Ubuntu 9.10 CD and then copied all of the WINNT32*.* files (and a WINNT32 folder) from the source computer to the laptop's C:\I386 via jump drive.  Back in UBCD, I tried running that same WINNT32 command and got that same "could not be loaded or is corrupt" error.  One post suggested this sort of message might be due to insufficient RAM.  A Microsoft webpage said that I should double-click on WINNT32.MSI.  I wasn't in a GUI, so I just tried typing WINNT32.MSI at the command line.  This opened a dialog asking me what program I wanted to use to open this kind of file.

Since I had a command prompt using UBCD, I tried a different approach.  The command I used this time was:

X:\i386\winnt32.exe /syspart:C: /tempdrive:C: /makelocalsource

But this gave me an error, stating that this command was not recognized.  I tried it again, inserting a BartPE jump drive and replacing X: with H: since H was where the jump drive was.  This worked, but it just gave me the same error message I had gotten a long time earlier:

Setup cannot continue because upgrade functionality is disabled and your copy of Windows XP only allows upgrades.

I tried replacing H with C, since I had already copied I386 to C.  This just gave me the message about WINNT32U.DLL being unloadable or corrupt.  One post led me to think that this problem might be unique to my WinXP SP3 disc, so I loaded an SP2 disc and tried winnt32.exe with that.  That did not seem to achieve anything:  the disc spun up and then down and I was back at the command prompt.  I tried it again with the SP3 CD.  Same result.  Apparently I had mistyped the command previously.

I thought maybe I could run winnt if I could find a 16-bit DOS equivalent.  My search led to FreeDOS, where I downloaded FDFullCD.iso.  I burned it and booted the laptop with it.  I indicated that I wanted to boot FreeDOS, and then chose option 3, FreeDOS Live CD with HIMEM + EMM386.  But I got this error:

Selected page frame e000 not available, searching automatically

No suitable page frame found.  EMS functions limited.

I gathered that EMM386 was not a good option in this case.  I rebooted and tried again, this time choosing option 4, HIMEM only.  This produced a bunch of error messages, but at least it put me to an A: prompt.  Drive B appeared to be a RAM drive.  The program did not recognize drive C.  I thought this must be because it was an NTFS drive, but no, FreeDOS did not recognize any drive, including the CD drive.  I booted FreeDOS again, and this time chose option 5, FreeDOS Live CD only.  I still got some error messages, including "There is no CDROM, or the wrong CD-ROM!"

I guessed that whatever kept this CD-ROM drive from recognizing WinXP was also impairing its recognition of the FreeDOS CD somewhat.     In that case, I wondered if I could install the contents of the WinXP CD from a bootable FreeDOS USB drive.  To make that, I followed instructions to install Unetbootin on my Ubuntu machine, and then used Unetbootin to make a FreeDOS bootable USB stick.  When that was done, I checked its properties and saw that Ubuntu indicated the filesystem type was msdos.  I copied the /I386 folder from the slipstreamed WinXP SP3 CD to the USB stick, put the USB into the laptop, and rebooted.  After a Unetbootin screen, I was back at the FreeDOS menu.  I tried option 3; same errors as before.  I tried option 5.  This time, it recognized the USB drive as drive C.  Then I realized that this was no help; it still couldn't see the partition on the hard drive where I wanted to install WinXP.  Well, could I reformat that partition as FAT32?  I formatted another USB drive as FAT32, put it into the laptop, and rebooted from the FreeDOS stick.  It did recognize the FAT32 USB drive.  Now, could I install WinXP on a FAT32 partition?  It looked like it was supposed to be possible.  I pulled out the USB drives, rebooted the laptop with GParted, and replaced the NTFS partition where I had planned to install WinXP with a FAT32 partition.  (I figured this would be much faster than trying to convert from NTFS to FAT32.)  Of course, now I was wondering whether the FAT32 alternative would also have made a crucial difference with some of the attempts to install from UBCD.  When GParted was done, I rebooted with the FreeDOS stick.  Sure enough, now I could see the FreeDOS stick as drive C and the WINXP partition as drive D.  I tried using XCOPY, but it didn't work.  I wasn't sure how to copy subfolders etc. in FreeDOS.  Rather than research it, I removed the FreeDOS USB, rebooted with UBCD, plugged in the FreeDOS stick, found that WINXP was now drive C and the FreeDOS stick was drive G, and therefore used XCOPY G:\I386\*.* C:\I386 /E /H /Y to copy the I386 folder from the FreeDOS to WINXP.  This time around, that ran very smoothly.  I rebooted with the FreeDOS USB stick.  I went into the I386 folder on the WINXP partition (which was drive D in this case), and typed WINNT.  Windows XP Setup asked me where the XP files were located.  It defaulted to D:\I386, so I left it at that.  Next, it said this:

Windows XP Professional Setup

Setup did not detect SmartDrive on your computer.  SmartDrive will greatly improve the performance of this phase of Windows Setup.

You should exit now, start SmartDrive, and then restart Setup.  See your DOS documentation for details about SmartDrive.

I looked into SmartDrive.  Along the way, I ran across the ingenious suggestion that I could use an IDE to USB adapter and, with that, could use the internal CD drive on a desktop computer as an external drive for some other computer (if I had needed to do that).  (This would require leaving the CD drive's power connected in the host computer.)  SmartDrive itself was an MS-DOS disk cache program, to speed up file transfer times.  It appeared that FreeDOS might have its own cache arrangement, presumably faster if I could get HIMEM and/or EMM386 to load.  The best I could do was to reboot, choose FreeDOS option 3, ignore the FreeDOS boot error messages, and continue past the WinXP setup message about SmartDrive.  WinXP setup next said, "Please wait while Setup copies files to your hard disk."  It copied files for a while, and then froze.  I had heard something about how WINNT would only start the process, so I rebooted with UBCD, went into C:\I386, and typed "winnt32.exe /syspart:C: /tempdrive:C: /makelocalsource" and, this time, it worked!  It gave me "Welcome to Windows Setup" and then asked for my WinXP's product key.  I went through the various options, accepting the defaults (including the offer to upgrade my drive to NTFS), and it began the installation process.  It estimated that it would take 52 minutes, instead of the usual 39.  But then something happened.  I turned away, and when I looked back, we were back at the UBCD prompt.  I ran WINNT32 again, just like before, but this time I said No to the option of upgrading to NTFS.  It didn't matter.  I ran it a third time, and again it crashed, shortly after it finished "Copying Installation Files."  No error message or anything.  I rebooted UBCD and tried installing again from the I386 folder that I had added to the bootable FreeDOS USB drive, using the command "G:\i386\winnt32 /syspart:C: /tempdrive:C: /makelocalsource" (because G was where the system saw the FreeDOS USB drive).

So now I wondered whether I could boot to a very WinXP-compatible 32-bit command line.  I started with Vista.  My Vista installation was not booting at this point, probably because I had told GParted to hide the Vista partition, so I inserted the Vista DVD and rebooted.  I went with its Repair Your Computer option but didn't proceed with the repair, choosing instead the steps necessary to get a command prompt.  I inserted the FreeDOS USB and found it at drive H.  But before trying it, I went to C:\I386 and ran that WINNT32 command again.  It proceeded just as it had done in UBCD, except I didn't recall having to agree to the license agreement in the UBCD process.  It crashed -- it put me back to the command line -- just as it had done in UBCD.  I tried again, this time starting from the I386 folder in the FreeDOS USB.  I even swapped out the Vista CD for the WinXP CD, just in case that would make any difference.  It didn't.  Another crash.  I took out all bootable items, rebooted, and got "Disk error.  Press any key to restart."  So, no, it had not by some magic completed the process.

I rebooted UBCD.  On another computer, I copied C:\Windows\system32\chkdsk.exe to a new Utilities folder on the FreeDOS USB.  I plugged in the FreeDOS USB, navigated to C:, and typed D:\Utilities\chkdsk /r.  It ran.  I told it to force a dismount.  It quickly checked files and slowly checked free space.  It found no problems.  I rebooted with GParted and had it check the filesystem on the WINXP partition.  No problem there either.  I wondered if the presence of even a hidden Vista partition was screwing things up for WinXP.  I deleted both partitions and recreated WINXP.  The WinXP CD would still not boot.  The Vista CD would still boot, and it gave me a command line from which I could run winnt32.  Even so, it crashed again.  I wondered whether the problem was with my SP3 CD.  I made another folder on the FreeDOS USB, naming it I386-SP2, and copied the I386 folder to it from the WinXP SP2 CD that I had used in making the SP3 CD (i.e., having the same product key).  I tried running WINNT32 again from the Vista command prompt, using this I386-SP2 folder as the source.  This gave me an error:

Setup was unable to build the list of files to be copied.

The system cannot find the path specified.

I verified that the WINXP partition was still drive C, and that it contained an I386 folder.  The problem seemed to be that the I386 folder has to be named I386 -- nothing more, nothing less.  I renamed I386-SP2 to be I386 and re-ran the WINNT32 command.  It crashed again, in exactly the same way as before.  I checked C: to see what WINNT32 was actually doing there.  The answer: not much.  It was creating files named $WIN_NT$, with the extensions .~BT and .~LS, along with a file named textsetup.sif, and it had copied NTLDR over.  And that was about it.  I deleted those $WIN_NT$ files and tried WINNT32 again, this time using the product code from my other WinXP CD.  It crashed, of course.

Someone said that a problem something like this one sounded like it might be due to a bad CPU or other hardware.  Of course, that was always possible.  I wasn't ready for that yet; after all, everything else seemed to work OK.  But I was running out of other theories.  Then I stumbled into a search from which I gathered that "downgrade" was an official searchable term, especially where Vista was concerned.  PC Magazine had a two method article, but neither method would work for me since I wasn't able to boot from the XP CD.  I found what looked like the consummate downgrading guide, with specific information for my laptop model.  For a CQ60 with an Intel CPU, it seemed to say that I should slipstream the ICH9 SATA driver (ICH9M-E/M SATA AHCI Controller) into the XP installer using nLite.  To get the ICH9, I downloaded and unzipped f6flpy3289.zip, but I did not understand why the highly regarded CherylG was telling me that I would find my driver inside iaAHCI.inf.  In the process of digging around for the driver she named, I contracted a virus, which prompted me to get up-to-date on Spybot Search and Destroy and on the Web of Trust add-on for Firefox.  I eventually found the driver on an HP webpage (though not the downloads webpage for my laptop).  I ran it on another computer (it was an .exe file) and it tried to install itself but then said the computer didn't meet the requirements, which I assume meant something about its particular CPU.  The conclusion there seemed to be that it would help to run it on a computer whose hardware was very different from the target computer, so that it would just extract but would not install.  I didn't know if it would run on the laptop from the Vista prompt, but anyway this was not the concept of slipstreaming, so I went back to the first one that CherylG had pointed toward.  Then I downloaded nLite and looked at the recommended guide for slipstreaming the driver.  Now that I saw the guide, I understood why CherylG was pointing me toward an .inf file.  She apparently didn't mean that I somehow had to extract the driver from iaAHCI.inf; I just had to include that .inf file in the slipstream.  This seemed to be the only thing I had to slipstream, so I went ahead with it.

The slipstreaming process began by copying the entire SP3 CD to a folder on the hard drive that I called SP3CD.  I started to install nLite, which required the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.  Installing that required trying to update .NET Framework 1.1 and then downloading a tool to uninstall it when the updates failed, and then manually doing registry edits etc. to uninstall it when the tool failed.  That ran overnight.  Next morning, when that was done, I followed the MaxEasyGuide to slipstreaming with nLite.  The first time, for some reason, it did nothing.  Second time, it made a file that I called SP3-SATA.ISO, containing the ICH9M-E/M SATA AHCI Controller driver from within iaAHCI.inf -- and now I understood what CherylG was saying.  Next question:  what was I supposed to do with this thing?  I decided to open it with UltraISO and copy its I386 folder to another folder.  Then I ran Beyond Compare to see how different it was from the original slipstreamed SP3 I386 folder.  It looked like there were a couple dozen differences in files.  So, OK, the nLite process seemed to have done something.  I wasn't sure I had done all of these steps right, but I decided to give it a shot.  I used Beyond Compare to synchronize the I386 folder on the FreeDOS USB with the I386 folder I had just extracted from SP3-SATA.ISO.  Whoa.  Many, many differences.  I forgot -- I had been using the SP2 I386 folder.  I changed that around and re-ran the comparison.  Still tons of differences!  Oh, I knew why.  It was because of the timechange.  The files were mostly the same, but some had been created an hour before the others of similar name.  I told Beyond Compare to ignore unimportant differences and did a full refresh, but that made no difference.  I bit the bullet and upgraded 6,992 files on the FreeDOS USB.  While that was underway, I re-ran the nLite and Beyond Compare processes, just to be sure.  Everything looked good.  I put the updated FreeDOS USB drive into the laptop and re-ran the WINNT32 command.  Alas, that wasn't the answer.

I found another thread that seemed to say that CherylG's advice on drivers was for an AMD CPU, whereas my CQ60-420US had an Intel CPU.  But some respondents said they were definitely using the Intel drivers and it still wasn't working.  Unfortunately, the drivers they pointed to were no longer availlable at the Intel website.  Daniel Potyrala advised that I download and run CPU-Z in order to find out not only my CPU type but also my chipset.  I couldn't very well run CPU-Z without an operating system.  Since it seemed that having Vista on the same hard drive did not explain why I could not even run WINNT32, it seemed to be time to restore the Vista partition using GParted and Acronis.  Adam Pash assured me that it didn't matter which came first, WinXP or Vista, so I left the WinXP partition in place (in hopes that it would someday be operational) and just added the Vista partition behind it.  I downloaded the appropriate version of CPU-Z, jumped it over to the laptop, and installed and ran it.  CPU-Z said that my mainboard chipset was an Intel GL40, which meant that I needed to slipstream . . .  the ICH9M-E/M SATA AHCI Controller driver, just like before.  So Mr. Potyrala was wrong; CherylG had given me the right tip.  But then Fernando1 said there were different drivers for 32-bit and 64-bit CPUs.  My T4200 Pentium (Penryn) was a 64-bit.  It was hard to tell the two apart; the driver names were the same.  I repeated the nLite process.  This time, the Textmode driver I selected was the ICH9 SATA AHCI Controller (Desktop ICH9R).  There were, again, some differences, so once again I updated the FreeDOS USB drive and tried it in the laptop, this time typing  "I:\i386\winnt32 /syspart:F: /tempdrive:F: /makelocalsource" because the FreeDOS USB was at I: and the WinXP partition was now at F.  That didn't work, so I tried once more, this time selecting the ICH8R/ICH9R SATA RAID Controller.  That didn't work either.

It was time to quit.  The webpages to remember, for future reference, included Quang Do's post in an HP forum, listing drivers and their sources; ditto Riskyone101; and perhaps a post, by wimb, that I really didn't understand.  The approach to remember was to use Unetbootin in Ubuntu to quickly create a FreeDOS bootable USB drive, if I needed 16-bit support, or just a Vista DVD or UBCD, if I could go straight to 32-bit support; to format the target drive in FAT32 rather than NTFS if necessary; to use nLite to create a slipstreamed ISO, assuming I could find the right drivers, and UltraISO to extract files from that ISO to load via USB drive if necessary.  I didn't know why WinXP could not run on the laptop, and I wasn't sure what else to try at this point.

About Disability Business Technical Assistance Centers (DBTAC)

In the course of researching another question, I ran across a reference to a DBTAC.  It was difficult to locate clear information on what a DBTAC was.  This post presents the gist of what I found in my examination of that question, with a focus on DBTACs along with incidental references to related organizations.

According to the Guide to U.S. Department of Education Programs (2009) (referred to here as the DoE Guide), the Department of Education (DoE) had a number of disability and rehabilitation research programs in 2009.  One such program was the Disability and Business Technical Assistance Centers (DBTAC) program.

The DoE Guide (p. 42) says, "DBTACs provide technical assistance and training to state and local governments and private businesses regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to facilitate compliance with ADA and conduct disability and rehabilitation research, and research development activities."  The references to research mark a change, resulting from the work of the DBTAC Coordination, Outreach and Research Center (CORC) at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).

What appears to be the first DBTAC webpage was posted in December 1998 at its present location, adata.org, where "adata" stood for ADA Technical Assistance.  According to a webpage describing the DBTAC CORC project, however,

In 2006, the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research [NIDRR] sought to further strengthen the [DBTAC] network by infusing the principles of evidence-based practice and knowledge translation. All DBTACs were asked to expand their core activities beyond technical assistance and strict [ADA] compliance and to include programs in the conduct and utilization of research. 

To facilitate this transition, NIDRR developed [the DBTAC CORC at VCU].  With an emphasis on communities of practice and demand-side job placement, the CORC exists to discover constructive ways for businesses to replicate best practices regarding employment and public access.

That webpage further says that one CORC objective was to create "a definitive ADA Web site, known as the DBTAC-Information Network."  That objective may have been responsible for the apparent decimation of webpages at the adata.org website between 2005 and 2007.  The site has since been built back to some extent, in a more visually pleasing form, and now (somewhat confusingly) describes itself as the DBTAC National Network of ADA Centers (still at www.adata.org).  Perhaps because NIDRR was not impressed with the research efforts funded by the DBTACs, it seems that, starting in 2009, DBTACs have been maintained but have ceased to offer grants.


Incidentally, to clarify the foregoing reference to the NIDRR, the DoE Guide (p. 45) says,

The primary purpose of NIDRR is to carry out a program of research and related activities designed to maximize the full inclusion, employment, independent living, and economic sufficiency of individuals with disabilities, with particular emphasis on improving the effectiveness of services authorized under the Rehabilitation Act.

That page indicates that "Rehabilitation Act" is short for the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended, 29 U.S.C. §§ 762-764.  The Rehabilitation Act seems to have provided for at least some of the research-oriented programs that (unlike DBTACs) seem to be at the heart of NIDRR's work.  For example, under 29 U.S.C. § 764(b)(2), the DoE was authorized to create Rehabilitation Research and Training Centers (RRTCs) around the country, for the purpose of creating new knowledge.  Such knowledge-production efforts are tracked by the National Rehabilitation Information Center (NARIC), which maintains a database, searchable by state, listing currently funded NIDRR research projects.

As I say, I discovered the existence of DBTACs while I was looking into another question.  The question I was examining had to do with the definition of "impairment."  In that research, I came across an adata.org webpage offering a definition under the ADA.  That webpage was undated, so I suspected that its interpretation might be obsolete.  The webpage says, "Contact your regional DBTAC at 1-800-949-4232 V/TTY for the most up-to-date information."  But I wanted to know whether the information I would get from such a source would be at all reliable.  In the process of investigating DBTACs, I came across something better than telephonic advice:  a 2009 Disability Law Handbook, prepared by the regional DBTAC in Houston.

Disabilities and Politically Correct Terminology: Some Current Articles

I just did a search for scholarly articles mentioning "politically correct" and "disabilities" in the first few months of this year.  This gave me 22 hits.  In this post, I set out to summarize what those articles said about disabilities and politically correct terminology.

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Whitfield, H. W., Venable, R., & Broussard, S. (2010). Are client-counselor ethnic/racial matches associated with successful rehabilitation outcomes? Rehabilitation Counseling Bulletin, 53(2), 96-105.

This article did not mention political correctness, and therefore did not come up in my search.  What did come up was a document entitled “Continuing Education Questions” that appears on pages 121-123 of that same journal volume.  One of the questions referring to this article appears in that list of questions (on p. 122).

Turner, R. J. (2010, January 25). [Review of Review: Teach! Change! Empower! Solutions for closing the achievement gaps, by Carl A. Grant.] InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 6(1).

Turner uses “politically correct” in two places.  The first says this:

Grant does make it clear that educators [apparently at the high school level] should work in groups (p. 1), and that the encouragement of colleagues may lead to greater candor. But in our politically correct, hyper-polite society, whether co-workers will point comfortably to one another’s inner bigot is questionable.

In this quote, Turner seems to be critical of political correctness, equating it not with politeness, which would presumably be positive, but with hyper-politeness, which implies excess.  The nature of the excess that Turner identifies seems to be that politically correctness operates as a potential barrier to the frank identification of bigotry in one’s coworkers.

We teachers can no longer afford to insulate ourselves from difference and hide behind politically correct jargon if we want to remain relevant in a technologically driven global community.

Here, Turner again characterizes politically correctness as “jargon” and a barrier to relevance.  When she speaks of “difference,” she seems to be referring to the previous sentence, where she says (quoting Lu, 1992) that students and educators need to recognize the politics of their decisions.  Turner offers the example of an exercise, described in Grant’s book, in which the instructor selects books that involve race, class, gender, or disability, and develops multimodal assignments that allow student expression through writing, drawing, and role playing.  The point of such an exercise would be to involve students’ multiple learning intelligences in instructors’ efforts to “address the elephant in the room” by actively including different sociocultural groups in what they teach.

Turner, and apparently Grant, seem to be saying that, if differences among people are not deliberately brought into the classroom through e.g., the assignment of diversity-oriented books, then instructors will be essentially complicit in making sure that students are simply assimilated into the dominant culture.  Such assimilation will only exacerbate the “mire of esteem issues” that disadvantaged students struggle with.

The idea seems to be that teachers and/or readings tend to be from a gender, race, and/or social class that does not match those of many disadvantaged students; that this needs to be brought out into the open; and that politically correctness hinders teachers from doing so.  I am not sure how that last step works.  I am guessing that she means that teachers in very mixed classrooms in Los Angeles may be walking on eggshells to use politically correct terminology, and are therefore not communicating frankly and effectively.

Jerlinder, K. (2010). Swedish primary-school teachers' attitudes to inclusion - the case of PE and pupils with physical disabilities.  European Journal of Special Needs Education, 25(1), 45-57.

I was not able to access the full text of this article.  The abstract makes no references to political correctness.

Parley, F. (2010). The understanding that care staff bring to abuse. The Journal of Adult Protection, 12(1).

I was not able to access the full text of this article.  The abstract makes no references to political correctness.

Mohideen, H. Ali, M., & Mohideen, S. (2010). Awareness of contemporary lexical change for professional competence in English language education. European Journal of Social Sciences, 13(1).

The abstract for this article, written by two members of the faculty at the International Islamic University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, states:

Influential languages such as English reinvent themselves and prosper. The ongoing language developments taking place in such dynamic languages make it imperative for language users to be up-to-date and be familiar with the changes affecting the language they are professionally involved with, more so those involved with its instruction. . . . Language teachers’ awareness of such changes will enhance their professional growth.

Within that background, the article’s sole reference to political corrections appears, in context, as follows:

As teachers, we need to be keenly aware of what has come to be known as verbal hygiene (Cameron, 1995). Verbal hygiene is non-offensive, non-sexist and non-racist language. There are interested groups who believe “that achieving a change in linguistic usage is itself a worthwhile form of public, political action and consciousness raising” (Holmes, 2008: 332). Verbal hygiene is synonymous with being politically correct and euphemistic [emphasis added]. When we practice verbal hygiene we avoid being vulgar, racist, sexist and discriminatory to individuals and specific groups of people. Gone are the days when we described our below average students as ‘weak’ and ‘poor’. Today we refer to them as ‘underachievers’. They are ‘intellectually challenged’ or ‘not very bright’. Positive words are included in describing disabilties. 

Educators need to use language which is not so unpleasant, less harsh and less hurtful. Euphemistic terms are being coined continually. Even the widely used term ‘disabled’ to refer to people with physical disability has been found to be inadequate. There is recognition that disabled people have abilities which are different from physically normal people. A new term which has been proposed is ‘people who are differently abled’. Another term now is ‘physically challenged’. 

Language instructors are looked upon as models for language use by students and parents. Euphemistic use will provide the instructors a healthy image of being sensitive, fair, contemporary and, accommodating.

I found this excerpt disturbing, amusing, remarkable; and the more I looked into it, the more so it became.  First, the editorial advisory board for this “European” journal named 30 people, of whom 21 (many with names that do not sound either European or American) were at universities in the United States, and six were at universities in Asian and Middle Eastern countries.  Of the other three, two were at universities in the United Kingdom, and one was at a university in Macdeonia.  It thus tentatively seemed to be more of an American or, at best, a global journal of perspectives on European social science.

I could not locate an introduction to the issue in which this article appeared.  It seemed that some, but not all, of the articles in this issue were pedagogically oriented.  As with this particular article, most seemed (judging by titles) to be oriented toward social science topics in developing nations, not in Europe.  At this point, then, I had no idea why this was called a European journal.  Its “Aims and Scope” said nothing about Europe, except to mention European Studies (among a number of other topics) as an area of focus.

The abstract, in the first excerpt quoted above, acknowledged the dominance of English, and attributed that dominance to the English language's dynamic self-reinvention.  In this context, the foregoing remarks about the journal’s provenance gave me the impression that its readers tended to be what one might call Third-World Anglophiles, especially in a social science sense.  The idea seemed to be that educated people from developing countries would convey Euro-American social science concepts back to, or would employ such concepts in, their homelands.  Politically correct language appeared to be a part of the socioscientific package being thus transmitted.  Current developments in disability-related terminology evidently comprise part of a cultural avant-garde with which non-native speakers of English are trying to keep up.

The point of the article (based upon the abstract and a brief glance otherwise) seemed to be that, to be competent and/or perceived as competent, an English teacher must remain current in his/her knowledge of English.  In the authors’ view, such a teacher should be aware that it is politically more correct to call a student “not very bright” than to call them “weak,” and that “differently abled” and “physically challenged” are new disability-related terms.  This was, as I say, remarkable.  In a brief search, I found “differently abled” in a footnote in a law journal article from 28 years ago (Ferleger, 1982, p. 595).  Not exactly a new term!  If this is the state of affairs for English teachers in developing nations, one might infer that the generation of new terminology will facilitate the disability-related linguistic inferiority of English learners in those nations for the indefinite future.

Interestingly, Ferleger's footnote read as follows:  "'Differently-abled'" is a more positive and more accurate description than 'handicapped' or 'disabled,' words which have acquired negative connotations, especially to those people to whom they are applied."  This prompted me to wonder:  if “disabled” can be rehabilitated as “persons with disabilities,” could “handicapped” fare likewise?

The foregoing excerpt from the Mohideen article equates political correctness with euphemism, which itself is defined as “the substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant.”  Ferleger’s footnote thus seems to have identified the core issue:  euphemisms are preferred in order to avoid offending the people to whom they are applied.  The implicit message is that those people are vulnerable to what others call them.  This is a slippery slope.  What offends is not, ultimately, the term itself.  The arrangement of letters in c-r-i-p is not intrinsically more offensive than in its inverse, p-i-r-c.  What is offensive is how c-r-i-p is used.  It is (sometimes) used disparagingly, and therefore becomes something that some people would not want to be called.

The problem is that anything can be used disparagingly, and ultimately the attempt to avoid that reality (through e.g., “differently abled”) becomes disparaged itself.  For example, despite Ferleger's sensitivity, his own article uses words (e.g., "retarded") that are now considered insensitive.  What would seem to better serve the Mohideens and the disabled alike, at this point, would be to stop confusing people with new terms and focus instead, on developing clear and kindhearted understandings of people and situations.

It is interesting that the Mohideens consider political correctness to be a rejection not only of discrimination, but also of vulgarity.  Their perspective on what we are doing, with politically correct language, seems to be that we are incidentally looking down upon language that is common, coarse, and lacking in cultivation or taste.  And that is interesting, because discrimination tends to be against disadvantaged people, whose socioeconomic circumstances do frequently put them among the more uncultured elements of society.  In the name of helping less privileged people, that is, we seem to be disempowering those very people from speaking in their own terms.

A final observation:  as quoted above, the article says, “Euphemistic use will provide the instructors a healthy image of being sensitive, fair, contemporary and, accommodating.”  The authors seem to have unwittingly captured the key point:  political correctness conveys an image of fairness and sensitivity.  It does not necessarily have much to do with actual fairness and sensitivity.

Perlstein, M. (2010). Virgins and veterans: Culturally sensitive supervision in the LGBT community. Women & Therapy, 33(1-2), 85-100.

This article’s only reference to “political correctness” is as follows:

I feel that if one is not overly “politically correct,” humor that will not be perceived as laughing at someone but with someone helps ameliorate tense situations, allowing them to be held up to the light. 

Perlstein thus treats political correctness as a potential hindrance to therapeutic humor, consistent with a study suggesting that liberals enjoy humor less than conservatives (Ariely, 2008).  The point seems to be that someone whose sense of humor and ability to laugh at him/herself has not been eroded by abuse may find it easier to participate in the reduction of tension in some situations.

Lumby, J., & Morrison, M. (2010). Leadership and diversity: theory and research.  School Leadership & Management, 30(1), 3-17.

I was not able to access the full text of this article.  The abstract makes no references to political correctness.

Smith, S. R., Purzner, T., & Fehlings, M. G. (2010). The epidemiology of geriatric spinal cord injury. Topics in Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation, 15(3), 54-64.

I was not able to access the full text of this article.  The abstract makes no references to political correctness.

Kendler, K. S. (2010). The problem:  Charge to the conference.  In D. P. Goldberg, K. S. Kendler, P. J. Sirovatka, & D. A. Regier (Eds.), Diagnostic issues in depression and generalized anxiety disorder: Refining the research agenda for DSM-V.  Arlington, VA : American Psychiatric Association.

What Google Books identifies as this book’s only use of “politically correct” is as follows:  “Although it might be politically correct to argue that all validators are created equal, this is unlikely to be a sustainable position” (p. 7).  A validator, as Kendler is using the term here, seems to be something that validates an interpretation.  Kendler appears to be using the term in a tongue-in-cheek fashion:  he seems to be alluding to the concept that “all men are created equal,” and treating that as a politically correct belief.  It is interesting that he may thus inadvertently give us a glimmer of insight into how members of his circle view that concept.  In any event, he seems to be contrasting political correctness against accuracy.

Kaldjian, L. C., Shinkunas, L. A., Bern-Klug, M., & Schultz, S. K. (2010). Dementia, goals of care, and personhood: A study of surrogate decision makers' beliefs and values. American Journal of Hospice & Palliative Care, 1-11.  DOI:  10.1177/1049909109358660

This article's only reference to political correctness occurs in a statement from one of the patients who were evidently interviewed as part of a study.  That statement says, "He’s very much not politically correct and that upsets my one brother."  No context is provided.  It is not clear whether the lack of political correctness in that instance upsets the brother because the brother, himself, is a member of a group to whom disparaging reference is made, or whether it is just that the brother prefers for people to use politically correct terminology.

Gilborn, D. (2010). The white working class, racism and respectability: Victims, degenerates and interest-convergence. British Journal of Educational Studies, 58(1), 3-25.

I was not able to access the full text of this article.  The abstract makes no references to political correctness.

Ashbolt, A. (2010, January 18). Time for a real education revolution.  The Drum: Unleashed.  

"Politically correct" does not appear in the article.  It appears only in one reader's comment, as follows:

What the parents really need is a huge dose of reality. They also probably need parenting classes so that they can understand their responsibility concerning the raising of their children. School is there to give the children an academic education, not one in morality, or responsibility,, that is the parents responsibility.

Um I know that this is not politically correct to say things like this in anymore in Australia, but Huh,,, I don't live there anymore.

I emphasize with all the teachers in Australia. You certainly have a hard job to do, and I for one would never teach in Australia. Too bloody hard to deal with all the Ps and Qs.

Time to stop politically corrupting Australia's children.

This reader’s view seems to be that political correctness discourages people from saying that parents should play a greater role in teaching their children orality or responsibility.  This use of the term seems to emphasize the “speak no evil” aspect of political correctness, without involving any sorts of disadvantaged people.

Liddell, G. J., Liddell, P., & Shaffer, D. (2010). Is Obama black? The pseudo-legal definition of the black race: A proposal for regulatory clarification generated from a historical sociopolitical perspective. The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Minority Issues, 12, 213.

This article mentions “politically correct” one time, as follows:

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is the federal agency responsible for developing guidelines for the collection of data and recordkeeping concerning race in federal programs. . . . In its background statement, the OMB clarifies: "The [racial] categories represent a social-political construct designed for collecting data on the race and ethnicity of broad population groups in this country, and are not anthropologically or scientifically based." . . . The OMB guidelines state: "Terms such as 'Haitian' or 'Negro' can be used in addition to 'Black or [African-American].'"  In this statement, the OMB recognizes "race" as a sociopolitical construct, rather than a scientifically based construct for which many, including the American Anthropological Association, have argued.  It is also interesting to note that the definition treats "Haitian" as synonymous with "Black," "African-American," and "Negro."  This inclusion certainly leaves one querying as to what other geographical groupings might obtain their own politically correct moniker.

Without researching the background materials identified in footnotes (not shown in the quote), it appears that, for some reason, the OMB used racial categories of a sociopolitical nature, as distinct from racial categories that would be scientifically based.  It is not clear who is being referred to, in the statement about using “Terms such as ‘Haitian’ or ‘Negro.’”  It does not appear that the definition treats Haitian as synonymous with Black; it appears, rather, that OMB is assuming that Haitians are black.  What the final sentence seems to be saying is that OMB also assumes that Haitians are African-American.  It is not clear, from the limited amount of material supplied, whether that is an accurate interpretation of OMB.  Assuming it is, the last sentence seems to mean that OMB does not consider Haitian a race, and therefore treats Haitians as members of the race that is variously called Black, African-American, or Negro.  The authors thus seem to be musing that perhaps people from other geographical locations like Haiti will be assumed to be black as well, and thus will be likewise lumped in as Black, African-American, or Negro.  It would not be politically incorrect to call someone Haitian; the argument seems to be that the alleged African-American race is an admittedly sociopolitical category, chosen for its political correctness rather than for its scientific accuracy or logic.  In this reading, the authors use “politically correct” to mean terminology that almost nobody will complain about, even that terminology is scientifically nonsensical.

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At this point, I ran out of time for this project.  And it was probably just as well.  While some of these articles had given me some very interesting perspectives on disabilities and political correctness, most did not seem to link the two in any meaningful way.  I decided, in other words, that I could probably get more insight from a different search.

My interpretations of these articles (that is, of the portions of these articles that I glanced at) could be summarized as follows:

Turner.  Political correctness is something that teachers hide behind, to avoid offending anyone.  It discourages frank and open exchanges in the classroom.  As such, it treats disabilities and other minority statuses as something alien, dangerous, or otherwise not to be grappled with.  Teachers need to encourage students to address such topics.

Mohideen & Mohideen.  Political correctness generates an endless supply of new terms that non-native teachers of English must struggle to keep up with.  They will not always succeed at that.  They are therefore apt to remain somewhat outdated in the terms they use to refer to disability.  The purpose of these various new terms is to euphemize the low-class and discriminatory ways that unsophisticated people speak.  As such, the generation of political correct terminology disadvantages socioeconomically inferior people in English-speaking countries as well.  Discriminatory ways of speaking are discouraged, at least in part, because they offend people, but any term can be used offensively.  A focus on politically correct terminology appears to distract attention from a more readily transferred concern with actual fairness and sensitivity.

Perlstein.  Political correctness can impair humor, at times when humor would help.

Kendler.  Political correctness means saying something that sounds good, like “all men are created equal,” even if it not literally true.

Ashbolt.  A reader feels that political correctness means not saying anything that will offend anyone.

Liddell et al.  Political correctness means using terminology that sounds good or familiar, even if it does not make sense in the particular circumstances.

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Concluding Reflections

I was surprised that people were so negative about political correctness.  I probably should not have been.  It had not occurred to me that, by this time, the term was pretty much owned by people who are not happy with the directions or at least the excesses of culturally sensitive speech – aside from the occasional non-native English speaker who may not be catching some important nuances in this sort of discussion.

One concern, for people who are interested in the terms used to refer to disability, is that their selection of terms will be perceived, by a potentially large portion of their audience, as more of the same – more politically correct novelties, to be picked up and used in more or less the same way as the terms that people were using before.

My learning continues.  But by way of a progress report, at this point I am surprised that this sort of thing has been allowed to consume so much of the attention of disability advocates.  Possibly what is really happening, in all this, is that new terms have the advantage of being more likely to be heard and adopted by younger people and by those for whom it is important to be in the vanguard of “new” developments.  Maybe changing concepts of disability (or of other minority statuses) are brought into the mainstream for the purpose (or at least with the effect) of sidelining people who are older and/or less in-touch with such developments – by putting them, in other words, into a position in which their views and ways of speaking can be marginalized.

Presently, I am not sure how having a disability is fundamentally different from having a handicap.  I understand that "handicap" -- as a term, as distinct from a condition -- can be offensive because of its associations with past injustices.  At the same time, though, it is common, and it does not seem terribly important, that we still have, and refer to, "handicapped" parking spaces.  Younger people, with or without disabilities, are not necessarily familiar or concerned with the old battles in which "handicapped" and "disabled" really did make a difference.

In other words, at some point there does not seem to be a lot to be gained by just substituting one term for another.  At a certain point, the effort might be better spent in educating oneself and others on how a handicap is, as in golf, something that you start with, not necessarily where you end up.  In that sense, I would think that “handicap” would imply something less permanent and more surmountable than “disability,” which seems to mean that the ability just ain’t there, period.

If we are not just replacing one term with another that means more or less the same thing, but are instead switching to substantially more precise language, that’s different.  “Disabled” is not as clear as “learning disabled” or “developmentally disabled.”  But that, from what I can tell, is not what generates dissatisfaction with politically correct disability-related terminology.

Problems Installing Updates on Windows XP (KB976881 and KB977713)

I ran Automatic Updates in Windows XP Pro, running as a guest machine in VMware Workstation 7 on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala).  I had problems with two of the updates, namely, Security Update for Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 (KB976881) and Update for Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 Junk Email Filter (KB977713).  All other updates had installed without a problem; but when I ran these two updates, I got "Some updates could not be installed" and then the list of these two.  I went to the manual download pages for KB976881 and KB977713, but when I ran them manually (either from the website or after saving them to a named file on my system), I got "The update cannot be applied."   This problem persisted after rebooting the virtual machine and the system.  Unfortunately, searches for those messages yielded nothing helpful.

In Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs, I selected Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 and clicked Change.  I tried Reinstall or Repair > Detect and Repair and clicked the Install button.  This ran for a while and then said, "Installation ended prematurely because of an error" and then "Fatal error during installation."  I tried Change again, and this time chose Add or Remove Features.  Interestingly, Outlook did not even seem to be installed, leading me to wonder why Microsoft Updates was trying to update its junk email filter.  PowerPoint was installed, though.  I reversed this:  I unchecked PowerPoint, and I checked Outlook, and then clicked the Update button.  This, too, gave me "Installation ended prematurely because of an error."  I tried the same thing again, but this time I only tried one of the two:  that is, I unchecked PowerPoint, but did not check Outlook.  This, too, ended prematurely.  I tried once more, this time leaving PowerPoint checked and also checking Outlook.  Once again, installation ended prematurely.

In Add or Remove Programs, I clicked Change > Reinstall or Repair > Reinstall Office.  But that, too, ended prematurely.  So, using the last card in the deck, I chose Change > Uninstall.  This successfully uninstalled Office 2003.  While I was removing things, I also tried to uninstall Microsoft Office Live Add-in 1.3, but evidently I should have uninstalled that before uninstalling Office.  I ran a cleanup program (Advanced WindowsCare V2 Personal) repeatedly, until there were no more registry errors, and then reinstalled Office 2003.  Early in the installation process, I got a message, "Setup has detected pre-release or trial versions of Microsoft Office products on this computer.  To continue installation, Setup must remove these products."  This was a surprise to me, but I said OK.  I did a Custom Install, installing everything but InfoPath, which I never used.  When installation was done, I did not go immediately to look for updates on the Web, but instead installed Service Packs 1 and 2 from my computer, since I had already downloaded them.  Then I went to the Office Update page and saw that I probably should have just installed Service Pack 3, since it seemed to include SP1 and SP2.  I downloaded SP3 so I would have it for future use, and installed it from the download.  Then I went to Microsoft Update and ran repeated Express installations until there was nothing left, followed by a Custom search, to see what else they had for me.  There was nothing.  Just to be sure, I rebooted and tried the Custom search again.  Still nothing.  It seemed I had resolved the problem.

Major Types of Disabilities

As described in a separate post, I was trying to figure out what "the disability community" meant.  I wondered if it was based on different types of disabilities, so I did a search for that.  Figuring out the major types of disabilities turned out to be a pursuit of its own, as described in this post.

My search for "types of disabilities" yielded thousands of hits.  I looked at a few that appeared near the top.  It appeared that there was not one commonly accepted list of types of disabilities.  There seemed to be a couple different kinds of entries on these lists.  First, there were the ones that seemed to be included on most lists, such as vision, hearing, learning, and psychiatric disabilities.  Then there were some that appeared on some lists but not others, including dwarfism, ADD/ADHD, and seizures.

The Office of Student Disability Services at Johns Hopkins University provided one of the lists that I looked at.  Johns Hopkins is, of course, world-famous in medical education.  I assumed that their list would tend to be relatively coherent in light of current knowledge.  I was surprised, though, that they treated ADD/ADHD as a separate major type of disability, when the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) included it within the set of psychiatric disorders.  I suspected Johns Hopkins broke it out separately because their webpage was especially focused on disabilities that would affect college students.  I thought this might also be why their list did not mention developmental disabilities.

Since none of the pages that I looked at seemed to be drawing from any common source of knowledge, I decided I had better search some more.  I did a more refined search for types of disabilities and was belatedly reminded of the World Health Organization's (WHO) International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF).  I had not previously paid much attention to the ICF, but now seemed like a good time to learn a bit more about it.

As I discovered, the ICF identifies four categories of functioning (i.e., ability, not disability), each of which is sometimes referred to by a single letter.  Those four categories are Body Functions (b), Body Structures (s), Activities and Participation (d), and Environmental Factors (e).  Then there are numbered categories under each of those.  So, for instance, someone who was nearsighted would apparently have an issue under Body Functions (b), Chapter 2 (Sensory Functions and Pain) (b2).  More precisely, they would be under b210-b229 (Seeing and related functions), under b210 (Seeing functions), under b2100 (Visual acuity functions):  b21000 (Binocular acuity of distant vision).  In other words, the code for nearsightedness would apparently be b21000, which reads as follows:  "Seeing functions of sensing size, form and contour, using both eyes, for objects distant from the eye."  A nearsighted person would have an issue with that particular aspect of normal functioning.

According to Hendershot, Placek, and Goodman (2006), there were 1,494 codes in the ICF.  The purpose of the ICF seemed to be to provide a comprehensive diagnostic tool.  People -- in the U.S., at least -- did not presently seem to be sorting major types of disabilities according to their ICF chapters and subsections.  So I decided it was not my best source of a good list of the major types of disabilities.

I reconsidered the Johns Hopkins list.  Wikipedia informed me that what is called "developmental disabilities" in the U.S. can be called "learning difficulty," "intellectual disability, or "cognitive disability" in other countries.  So perhaps it was not necessary to have developmental disabilities as its own major type of disability; maybe it could be included in one or more of the others.  As I looked again at the Johns Hopkins list, I also wondered about brain injuries.  Couldn't they be included under physical disabilities?  They said, "A variety of physical disabilities result from congenital conditions, accidents, or progressive neuromuscular diseases," and they mentioned stroke as one of the conditions they were talking about.  That view of physical disabilities certainly sounded like it would include brain injuries.  They also said, "Traumatic brain injury typically results from accidents; however, insufficient oxygen, stroke, poisoning, or infection may also cause brain injury."  So it did seem that brain injuries were a type of physical disability.

But in that case, physical disabilities might also include problems of hearing, vision, and speech, as well as medical disabilities; and learning disabilities could include language problems.  It looked like a person could boil down the major types of disabilities to just three, or maybe just two:  physical and mental.  So why weren't people doing that?

Plainly, the experts were aware that the causes, locations, symptoms, and other features of various disabilities overlapped quite a bit.  They seemed to be trying to divide them out, not put them together.  The experts were developing things like the DSM and the ICF, with endless distinctions among disabilities; they weren't bickering about two or five or ten main categories.  The lists that I had been looking at were inconsistent with one another because the really knowledgeable people weren't involved with them.  They weren't trying to come up with the world's best list of top categories.  In a sense, this began to look like nothing more than a matter of semantics, for people who didn't know any better.

Well.  If the purpose of a list of major types of disabilities was just to give ordinary people something to work with in everyday life, we seemed to have already accomplished that.  According to the Lay Person's Categorization of Dysfunctionality, as expressed in plain English, we had a matrix structure of disability differentiation.  First, there was the kind of disability (e.g., blind, deaf, uses a wheelchair), and then there was its intensity, along a spectrum from "people hardly notice it" through "disabled" to "he's gonna die."

To develop a better vocabulary of disability categorization for ordinary usage, one that almost everybody could grasp and use, it seemed that it might be necessary to disregard the complex diagnostic schema of the DSM and the ICF, and focus instead on finding an approach that would help to generate appropriate levels of community understanding and support for people with disabilities.  I hoped to move in that direction as I continued to explore the world of disabilities.

What Is the Disability Community?

The Internet contains millions of references to "the disability community."  To figure out who was included in this community, I went to Wikipedia.  To my surprise, at this point there was no entry on the "disability community."  However, I did find a link to Disability.gov, which describes itself as "Connecting the Disability Community to Information & Opportunities"; but it appeared that they offered no definition either.  It then occurred to me to see if anyone else had answered exactly the question that appears in the title of this post.  That question did not seem to appear in the scholarly articles covered by Google Search at that time, and was very rare on the Web generally.

It began to appear that I might have to figure out a working definition for myself.  One of the few webpages that came up in that last search made a reference to leaders in the community movement, so I did a search for webpages referring to disability community leaders, to see what kinds of organizations or disabilities would be represented there.  That inspired me to search for "disability organizations," which got me started on a quest to figure out what are the major types of disabilities, which I describe in a separate post.

What I gathered, at this point, was that people were involved in disability-related efforts at multiple levels.  Someone who had a certain kind of disability, or was concerned about a loved one with such a disability, might be involved at the individual level, as a caregiver or as a mental or physical health client; or at the local level, with a focus on decisions by the school board and city council; or they might be involved in an organization they found on the Internet, composed of other people, scattered around the world, who have exactly that same disability, or with a more general-purpose disability support or advocacy organization with hundreds or thousands of members and clients.

To use an example from a different context, the American Red Cross may be a great general-purpose disaster-response organization, but that does not mean that they are intimately familiar with every aspect of every disaster.  There will be other organizations and companies that will have more expertise in the various kinds of equipment, personnel, and other resources that may be needed in a particular situation.  The Red Cross may be prominent in disaster-related discussions, but that does not mean that it speaks for, or even understands, all of the individual and expert efforts that combine to form the big picture.

So, to review, I had not found that a search for different kinds of disabilities had helped me very much, beyond the obvious level where I would include blind people and people in wheelchairs within the general disability community; and my idea of looking for leaders of disability-related organizations now seemed like it would tend to get steered toward prominent organizations that would not necessarily be very representative of the disability community as a whole.

At this point, I decided to look into a couple of scholarly articles that discussed the disability community.  One of those articles, by Batavia (2003), emphasized that there was not a united disability community.  There are these social categorizations -- people with disabilities, women, Lutherans -- and on some matters they are pretty much united with others in their category, but on many other matters they are very much in disagreement with one another.  On the issue of what is called Dying With Dignity or Physician-Assisted Suicide, for instance, Fadem et al. (2003) identified strong differences of opinion among people with disabilities:  some were afraid that permissive laws would result in the virtual execution of some people with disabilities, while others were more concerned with the right to make their own decisions about what happens to them.

A page on the website of the Washington Violence Against Women Network made a number of interesting statements, including these:

• If you ask 100 people – all of whom have a disability – if they are part of the “disability community,” 98 of them would probably answer “no.”
   
• Many people do not see themselves – or want to be seen by others – as having a disability.
  
• People with disabilities often find themselves alone in a world of people who do not understand what it is like to live with their particular disability. For example, it is difficult for people who are blind to believe they belong to the same community as people with cognitive disabilities.

What emerged from these materials was that "the disability community" is just a term that is used to lump together all sorts of very different people.  Some of the members of this so-called community are wealthy old folks who use a cane; others are kids from the wrong side of the tracks whose experiences of childhood abuse left them with behavioral issues, and who are now rotting in prison. 

I concluded that there is a disability community in the sense that there is a community of women:  for certain major purposes, a majority (but surely never 100%) of the individuals so identified do agree with one another -- on, for example, the need to pass important legislation, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act.  But as the focus moves away from those major but rare instances toward day-to-day living, it becomes increasingly likely that the "community" (perhaps the "movement" would be the more accurate term) will become fragmented into groups that are capable of disagreeing with each other on other major issues, such as abortion, in the case of the women's movement.

This conclusion suggested both a threat and an opportunity for those organizations and individuals who maintain a commitment to a broad-based, inclusive disability community.  The threat was that portions of that community will become opposed to one another to the point of schism.  For instance, Wikipedia informed me that the Deaf Culture is composed of people who believe that deafness is simply a difference, not an impairment.  A brief review of a Wikipedia page on cochlear implants suggested that differences of opinion on such topics can become controversial and heated, even within the "community" of deaf people.  It becomes difficult to have a cohesive disability community when there is not even a cohesive deaf community.

The opportunity raised by these remarks was suggested by the observation, above, that possibly 98% of people with disabilities do not consider themselves to be members of a disability community -- that, indeed, they may not even think they have disabilities.  There seemed to be an enormous pool of individuals who may disagree on important things, and yet share fundamental interests that continue to call for improvements.  To borrow again from the women's movement, abortion is controversial but, by comparison, gynecology is not; and yet gynecological knowledge and practices can continue to advance and be refined.  I suspected that, as I continued to look into topics relevant to the disability community, I might come to see more clearly some dimensions of this opportunity.

VMware Workstation 7: Improving Performance in 32-bit Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

I was in the process of tweaking an installation of x32 Ubuntu 9.10, and ran into some VMware performance issues.  Specifically, in VMware Workstation 7, I found that one of my virtual machines (VMs) performed much more slowly under 32-bit Ubuntu than it had performed under 64-bit.

To improve performance, I tried a couple of things.  I shut down the VM I was using, closed Workstation, typed "sudo vmware," and went into Workstation's VM > Settings > Hardware tab > Processors.  I had set it at 2, because I was using a dual-core processor, but I vaguely recalled that that had seemed slower at one point in the past, so I changed it to 1 processor.  I also increased Memory from 1000MB to 2000MB.  Also, while I was running Workstation as root, I went to Edit > Preferences > Memory.  I left Reserved Memory at 2500MB and changed Additional Memory to "Allow some virtual machine memory to be swapped," which as I recalled was the original setting.  I also thought that I might have been able to speed up the VM somewhat if it was smaller:  this particular one was 35GB, having been converted from a larger WinXP partition.  With these changes in place, I closed out of Workstation as root, started Workstation normally, and tried the VM again.  It was still very slow -- if anything, worse than before.  Some of this slowness could have been due to other hard drive activity.  I had recently installed Google Desktop, and it was indexing my hard drive throughout the time when I was writing this post.  But at this same time, another VM, set to 1 processor and only 1000MB of RAM, worked acceptably.

To speed things up further, there were numerous tweaks that would supposedly improve Ubuntu performance.  One speedup option was to buy a solid state drive (SSD).  This, it was said, would yield "a remarkable change in system performance - boot time and program startup times are drastically reduced. I highly recommend the investment - I have never before seen a single hardware change that affected performance as much as an SSD."  SSDs that would be large enough (30GB+) were currently at $150 and more, so that was something to think about for the future, as prices came down.  Getting an SSD would apparently call for some additional adjustments.

I ran a search to see if I could use the rest of my system's memory as a RAM disk.  This didn't seem to be a very common procedure.  But one post said it was simple.  The dominant approach seemed to be to tell Ubuntu to load its /tmp temporary files folder into RAM at startup.  There were different types of Ubuntu RAM disks.  The one called tmpfs seemed optimal.  The general idea seemed to be that you would set up tmpfs at a special location known as /dev/shm.  According to Kevin VanZonneveld, "The standard /dev/shm grows automatically as more space is needed, but is by default limited to half of your physical RAM. If you have 2GB, it can grow to 1GB at most."  There seemed to be ways to change that; but since I figured I'd typically have total RAM of 6GB to 8GB in my system, 50% of RAM seemed fine.  For future reference, there were ways to speed up Firefox by using tmpfs, but I hadn't noticed as much of a need for that, especially outside of the VMs.  What seemed most immediately promising, for my purposes, was to use /dev/shm for VMware specifically.  After some hunting, I found a website for VMware Server, but I wasn't sure whether I should try using its suggestions in Workstation.  I learned that KVM is an open source competitor with VMware but is still rather complex.  Then I noticed that someone said that a Physical Address Extension (PAE) aware kernel would allow 32-bit Ubuntu to use more than the (theoretically 4GB, but practically) 3GB RAM limitation.  I checked that out and concluded that 32-bit PAE performance was not going to be much better per se than plain 32-bit (and both would remain far below 64-bit performance), but neither would it hurt (unless I turned out to be one of those users who had problems with e.g., the mouse or graphics).  There was supposedly some performance reduction if you installed it in the standard way; the alternative was to build a custom kernel, which was beyond my time and abilities at that point.  I had just made an Acronis TrueImage backup, so I decided to try the standard approach, in its latest version.  First, I went to Synaptic and installed linux-generic-pae and linux-headers-generic-pae.  This did its thing for five minutes or so, and then said it needed to restart.  When the machine rebooted and got to GRUB, it showed me a new item:  "Ubuntu, Linux 2.6.31-19-generic-pae."  I selected that.  The BIOS told me, at boot, that I had 6GB of RAM.  When Ubuntu loaded, my previously opened windows were still in place (due to settings described in the previous post), but not VMware.  Instead, I had a dialog that said this:

VMware Kernel Module Updater

Before you can run VMware, several modules must be compiled and loaded into the running kernel.

So I went with that.  Meanwhile, I typed "free -m" and it reported that I did indeed have a total of 6050 of memory.  I wondered whether this would make any difference in VMware.  When the modules were done loading, I started VMware as root and increased the VM's allocation from 1000MB to 1500MB.  I also changed Additional Memory back to"Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM" and increased Reserved Memory to 5000MB of the 5472MB available to VMs.  Also, I changed the individual VMs to use 1500MB each.

Then I powered on the VM that had been working adequately before.  There was no question that it was much snappier.  With that one running, I powered up the other one, the one that had started the investigation.  So the additional memory definitely was available:  I had two machines running, where before I could only run one.  Now that I had two VMs up, the first VM, the better performer, was running more slowly.  The other one was still slow, but definitely was running better than before.  As before, the new Ubuntu kernel's audio started as muted, so I had to unmute it and turn it up, but then audio in both VMs worked.  There was stuttering in the second, larger VM.  To get the best performance, I turned off one VM and left just one running.  The memory enhancement had still not put me back to where I had been with 64-bit Ubuntu and 64-bit Workstation at their best, but if I got greater reliability and acceptable performance, that would be OK for now.  I did not pursue this further, though, because at about this time I began the process of upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04.