Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Frackin' Microsoft!
I had my computer at work crash on me. I thought it was going to be a simple procedure because the hard drive is fine, just the motherboard was fried. I thought I could just go out and pick up a new unit on the boss's dime, swap out the drive and be back in business.
Ha! Forty-eight hours later, I'm still recovering thanks to the evil twisted genius of Bill Gates.
First of all, my old XP operating system apparently only works on the computer it came with. Because poor old Microsoft might go broke otherwise, you know.
So I was forced to upgrade to the copy of Vista that came with my new system.
Now, you tell me: if you're a maker of computer operating systems and you are putting out a supposedly new and improved version of your old system, what is the number one most essential thing you would want to cover off?
You'd want to make sure your new OS was easily compatible with your users' old OS right? You'd want the upgrade process to be as painless as possible for them, right?
Well, Microsoft is much smarter than that. They figured out that computer users are much, much, much more concerned with online security than with ease of use, so they created a zillion devious systems to prevent "unauthorized" copying from other computers. Even your own.
The long and short is that Vista persistently refused to let me copy files from my old hard drive to my new one. It took me 24 hours, literally pausing only to sleep and eat, to dope out a solution, no thanks, of course, to Microsoft online support which was, as always, perfectly useless.
My advice: don't bother upgrading to Vista for at least another year. Give those morons at Microsoft time to work out those bugs that should have been handled in beta testing.
posted by Mentok @ 4:02 p.m.,
2 Comments:
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At 2:19 p.m.,
Rick said...
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For reasons I have to take the 5th (amendment against self-incrimination) when asked why, I bought a copy of Vista a while back and installed it on a new PC I was building.
I took it off 30 minutes later, unable, as a long-term user of XP, Windows 2000, and NT4 before that, to figure out how to do ANYTHING.
I DREAD when I have to start using it at work, but based on your experience and all the driver problems people have had for so long with Vista, it may be years before I have to go through that.
Same goes for the new version of MS Office, IMHO. -
At 3:26 p.m.,
Natsthename said...
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I hate Vista with a passion, and this is the first time I've had difficulty with a Windows upgrade. And, wankel, I am in on the MS Office hate, too, especially the new Outlook. Hate, hate, hate.
I'll bet this is why the fracker retired.
