Day: September 1, 2012

It’s not that their products are bad per se. Some of them are darn nice. I like their Office suite…

It’s that virtually everyone has Windows, and being a computer guy everyone expects me to be about to work with whatever Microsofts Flavor du Jour is.

It’s not uncommon to run across Windows XP, Vista, and Win 7 in the same office. Every one of these has a quirk or two and all of them are susceptible to various viruses.

Many folks turn off auto updating, the firewall,  and too many folks run without anti-virus protection.

There are those who think they’re running with their Virus protection turned on, but in fact at some point in the distant past they were compromised and the Anti-Virus is nothing but a dummy shell whose functions have all been subverted by a trojan or some kind of malware.

Then you have Microsoft who in it’s effort to hide? the problem will just show a meaningless dialog box that is all but useless except for an error code. 

Even I have to go look up the error codes and I’ve been doing this stuff for years.

I know I’m in deep when Auto Update, Firewall, and Windows Defender ALL fail to work. Something bad happened to the system I’m working on and that badness probably can’t be fixed by Microsofts happy crappy tools.

It would be so nice if Microsoft, instead of telling you something completely useless like “The application you’re trying to download is included in Windows version XYZ and doesn’t need to be downloaded”. Would do something like give you that message, and how to use the application. Then say something like If you still need to download ZYX application click here.

Then that link takes you to a page that explains if you’re seeing failures in the following programs, click here for an installer that will re-install all of them for you.

The assumption being that the computer you’re working on has been compromised by some kind of malware.

 But no, Microsoft has you play ring around the KB articles until your head is spinning and you’re tired and you just want to get out of the office you’re in and move on with your day.

What do I find on Google?

A simple explanation of the cause of the problem and instructions, all written on one page with links to a repository where the damaged files can be easily obtained.

Come on… Microsoft wrote the software and should have figured out what the problem was. Why is it that some amateur on a forum can put a simple concise document out on the net that makes sense and the creators of the software can’t?