Jeff and .NET

blah blah blah. Give me a break. I use windows all the time and I don't experience any of this crap you describe. I develop software too with VS2008 SP1 and I have even setup a fresh VMWare VM WinXP VS2008 SP1 machine without issues. Did you ever think maybe your SP1 install issue could be caused by Paralles? Of course not, how could it be Paralles it is an awesome Mac applicaton. Whatever!

Do you develop software for retail? If so what is it so I know not to buy it.

I've never used a Mac but I'm sure it is no better than windows.

I used OSX and think it is ok... But I don't really like it. I have installed VS 2008 (with SP1 on 3 PC/Laptops) and have not experienced any of the issues you cite (Vista 32/64 and XP 32/64).

At work several of the "real developers" (I'm not a full time developer) use VM and I have not heard them express the issues you cite.

I also don't load a bunch of crapware on my computers and clean all the crap of a PC when I buy it.

I suggest you take a look at what is running on your PCs to see what the issue is. If you are installing all of this on the Mac, I suggest you don't.

If you are a Mac fan switch to Java and call it a day.... You'll be happier.

Stu (it's my real name).

I have Vista Home 64bit and the machine flys. Never had a problem..it just works. And yes..i develop software, play games, edit videos, pictures etc.

Cellphones..know thats a different story.

Jeff,

I can see that these things are quite frustrating, but, and I'll say that I have run into these issues before.  There are known problems with installing from mounted ISOs in a VM, where sometimes the installation fails.  The work around is to copy the disk image to the drive (in this case, the VHD) and install from disk.  I do most (if not all) development in VMs and have experienced some of the challenges you faced above.  I'd be curious to know though, through a blog post, what your approach to building out your environments are.  There could be a step that you've missed, or something glaring that you've done that shouldn't be done in practice.  Saying "I hate Windows" is your opinion, but I see this often, and the reasons for the frustration, once you dig into it, usually stem from something the person may have been doing during their "process" which may likely be the culprit.

As for Vista, I've been running Vista, since the early builds of "Longhorn", and I've NEVER run into the problems that your fiance has experienced. Again, that's not any fault of hers, but I'd be curious to see if it's easily reproducable.  If it is, then it's potentially a bug, and this is something Microsoft should be told about in order to improve the product.  I've had numerous frustrations with Microsoft products, but I also try to be patient and retrace the steps to ensure that I might not be doing something wrong that's triggering it.

I work for Microsoft (in the field) going on 4 years now, and have been around Microsoft products for all my career and am proud of the Windows product overall.  Yeah, I (and a large number of my colleagues :-) have frustrations just like everyone else, but I do try to figure out what the issues/nuances are and try to work around them or figure out the best way to address them.

And remember, the community-at-large (including us) are asking Windows to do A LOT of stuff that Mac and other OSes aren't being asked to do. Obviously things will be screwy and some things should just work as advertised, but that's software.  If Windows didn't have to support multiple hardware configs and devices, or better yet, if we, like Mac for example, controlled our own hardware, then things would obviously be improved greatly. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't have that luxury.  I'm sure CoasterBuzz and POP Forums had a bug or two in it's time :-)

I'm really sorry you hate Windows as much as you do.  And with enough trackbacks/pingbacks/comments/pointers to this post, I'm sure the Windows Product Team will be too :-)

"To suggest the I might be doing something wrong is insane"

- Why is it so "insane" that "power/super users" such as yourself, couldn't be making a mistake?  Not challenging your experience here, but the statement above, coupled with "I hate Windows" from your blog post, suggests more "insanity" than me saying that there *could* be a problem with your process.

"Seriously, to suggest that my stupid Web site may have some bugs, used by a few thousand people a day, is anything like Windows, used by millions every hour, seems pretty strange to me."

- I didn't call your website "stupid", nor did I position your forums app as a being "bad".  And by the statement above, are you saying that the "few thousand people who use your site" aren't as important as the millions who use Windows? You mentioned "Jane Q Soccermom".  Well, I'm sure there are Jane Q Soccermon's out there who use the tools/apps you build and would resent that statement.

"Seriously, Lamont, why doesn't anyone at Microsoft care to stand up and say, "We can do better," and take a little leadership to make things not suck? Scott Guthrie and a lot of people in his DRG are like that, but they seem to not exist elsewhere, especially in the Windows group."

- Dude, there are more of us who feel the way that you do inside Microsoft than you think :-)  I wish I could break open Microsoft and let you look inside and see how many arguements go on (some of which I've been involved in) over functionality of products. ScottGu is one of many.  And I've met some Windows devs that would disagree with you.  Mind you I'm not defending them, but they DO exist, and engineering IS changing as a result.  But again, going back to your "millions of users" statement, it's not going to change quickly as Windows is huge and doesn't move with the agility of products with a smaller footprint.  

"See, the problem with making excuses about what Apple doesn't have to deal with is that consumers just don't care. You can't expect consumers to care that Microsoft doesn't control the hardware stack. And heck, these insanely stupid UI decisions in Vista are under Microsoft's control. I so need to get a screenshot of that photo moving dialog. Anyone with even a minor interest in human factors and UI would laugh."

- I'm not making excuses.  Note that at the beginning of my first comment, I said I've experienced the SAME things as you have. And realize, we're (you, me, and many others) are different consumers.  Do you think an average "consumer" cares if your install of VS 2008 SP1 on your VM failed?  I read blogs of great developers having problems with installing OSes/dev tools/utilities/etc, blog about how much they "hated" the experience/product/utility/etc, but that obviously doesn't resonate with the rest of the "consumer" base. Consumers do care that an ATI or NVidia card or their favorite Web Cam doesn't work properly on a new OS, and OS mind you, that grew out of "consumer" complaints (including mine :-) that the installation of some drivers (or error prone configuration) that rendered the system "unstable".

As for the Vista UI, I like it, even before I joined MS :-)  And I have to ask, what makes the UI any different than what we had in XP? You draw reference to the photo moving dialog, but what else?  Aero?  Turn it off.  UAC? Disable it.  I'm not getting the point you're making on "insanely stupid UI".

"So who is going to step up with the kind of leadership that will end the sucking?"

- steven.sinofsky@microsoft.com

"I know you didn't call anything of mine stupid... but I did, to point out the relative importance of my apps versus Windows. No, the users of my sites are not as important as the users of Windows. There is a hell of a lot less at stake, which is why I find it silly to compare the two."

- Well, I guess that's where we can agree to disagree. When I architect/develop a solution for a customer, their satisfaction are as important to me as the satisfaction of millions of users who use Windows are important to the Windows Team. You're right there's a lot more at stake with Windows.  But hey, Windows is not a forums app. So for those out there who want to build a community site with forums and choose POP, then I'd venture to say that the "relative importance" of your app grows exponentially in the spotlight as Windows fades to black.

"My "process" was downloading a file from Microsoft, double-clicking it, and watching it do nothing. Can you honestly with a straight face suggest that I'm doing something wrong?"

- Your "process" is likely not as simple as the above statement.  In your blog post, you said:

'Today I did a fresh VM install of XP so I can use it on the new job (by the way, unattended install using Parallels for Mac is breathtakingly fast when installing against the ISO). Next task, install Visual Studio 2008. Next task, install SP1.'

So it wasn't as simple as downloading a file from Microsoft and double-clicking.  Try it on a Windows-based PC (not virtualized) and see if the same problem arises.

"And you *are* making excuses, and I'm pointing out why they don't mean a hill of beans to consumers. You've got another one there, mentioning that Windows isn't as agile in its development. Tell me why consumers should care? In a battle of internal Microsoft reality versus consumers' desire to have stuff that just works reality, the consumers win every time. You keep trying to bring it back to my problem of a service pack not installing (or worse, suggesting it's my fault), when you refuse to see the bigger picture, that it's a failure representative of broader experiences that suck. Of course no one would care about my problem. But my mom *does* care that she can't check her e-mail for some stupid reason that you have to understand the quirks and innards of Windows to fix. That's who you should worry about. You're living in a dream world if you don't think there are millions of stories like that."

- You're right, consumers don't care.  But you obviously did, and made it known as a result of your blog post.  You say I'm deflecting, but you've deflected this away from the problem you talked about in your blog post during this conversation. A problem, mind you, that I've been focused on. I've not been trying to read more out of your post, just trying to understand what prompted your post, and try to help.

"What makes the UI different in Vista than XP? Not much, and that's exactly the point. What I really don't get is why some things were moved seemingly just for shits and giggles. But you want to talk about stupid UI? Right-click on the Windows desktop and click properties. Stupid UI with irrelevant options. Do the same thing in OS X, where all you get is "change desktop background, which opens the sane and rational system preferences (screen saver is there on a tab too). Look at printer property sheets in Windows, look at what's in OS X preferences. Ask a consumer to set up a user account on Windows, see if they can find it. Ask them where the firewall controls are. Windows is horrible when it comes to UI. Making it shiny and see-through doesn't make it better. It's lipstick on a pig, to use the parlance of our times."

- When I right-click on the desktop, I get several options to sort icons, create a new document, or personalize the desktop (along with an assortment of other options that 3rd party vendors have chosen to make available on that context menu.  Mind you the latter is not a Microsoft thing, but an enabled Microsoft capability. I get more than just "changing the desktop background". Is that a bad thing?

"One by one, the people I've worked with in the past year, long-time Windows-based developers, are becoming Mac-at-night guys. They're buying Macs for their kids and their parents. I intend to hand mine down to my fiance when I upgrade to a bigger laptop. Why? Because we hate playing the role of tech support, and for everything we use computers for, the OS shouldn't get in the way. I don't care that I'm using OS X, I care that I don't notice it's even there."

- I'm not disputing the new popularity of Macs by no stretch. Heck, there are folks at Microsoft that use Macs. What I find funny though is that I see many of these Mac-at-night guys run Vista on the Mac. So, that says something about Vista's potential. Sorry you hate playing the role of tech support. I play tech support for my family/friends (for both PC and Mac), and I agree with you that it can get frustrating. But I'll tell you, the amount of times I've heard "I like the Mac, but I wish it had the familiarity of Windows on the PC" far outnumber the "I hate Windows" statements (about 25-0)

Solitare says "Invalid Move" with an explanation of the rule violated in a tooltip in the corner of the screen when you make, get this, an invalid move. It's not like it put up a hex error code and then dumped core or something.

LOL,

Nice One DCMonkey

Vista is a big step backwards when it comes to experienced users.

Microsoft keeps making the OS more "user friendly" by explaining exactly what is done and why all the time, but for experiences users this is a big pain is the ass.

The file/overwrite dialog is a perfect example. It takes up half of the screen, has way to many text. Come one, after three times annyone knows the drill and a simple dialog with a button for every option should suffice. Many, many things are handled this way.

The entire My Documents story was a royal pain in the ass, when you're known with the filesystem and like to store stuff in your own folder structure without crap being added by other software all the time.

Experienced users should be able to disable all of these features with a single setting, instead of having to setup every seperate feature in a settings-fest that takes over an hour.

Another option would be a questionmark every time a dialog appears where there's extra information for non-experienced users.

Point is that Windows user-friendliness is fine for beginning users, but it's a big huge pain in the ass if you actually know what you're doing.

I think your logic is kind of stupid.

If you like it more, buy a Mac, use Java, and be happy.

I'm sure that some still will like Windows, and some will buy Mac, that's what competence/free-market is all about.

I like Windows.

Visual Studio 2008 is not a consumer product for soccer moms. It is supposed to be frustrating and technically challenging to install developer tools. If you can't do the install then you don't have the chops to be a developer so you don't need the tool anyway. All developer tools test you that way.

You've obviously had a frustrating time installing the product. That is unfortunate and I hope you get it resolved.

However, that doesn't make Windows bad; it makes your experience in this case bad. I've had many similar installations to do and simply haven't had that many issues when doing so. In fact, I've just gone through the steps you've described above (hopefully I've done them like you did) and it all worked OK, so rather than say it simply "sucks" maybe it would be better worded that you had a bad experience. Remember, it installed fine for me so does that mean Windows is "great"?

"Good enough" is, by definition, good enough.

Anything better is a novelty which with time becomes considered the norm.

Regarding your original problem, if I were to guess I would say your virtual machine lost network connectivity which caused the installer to fail. I would expect it to have failed gracefully but it is still a failure in the installer and not Windows itself.

@Lamont

I have a serious problem with your attitude and how to view the problem. First of all the "user" should NOT be able to do anything wrong. If he or she tries to do something wrong the software should be able to anticipate that and not let them continue. It's as simple as that. This is the standard any software company has to aim for. Anything less will not do.

Any time a client manages to prove that you haven't achieved this standard you should first apologize and second do your best to find out the cause of problem and do your best to help. If you can't do this you should not open your mouth and speak. Have a look at how Scott Guthrie handles these "complaints" and learn from him.

I'm with you Jeff, counting back at how many hours / days I've wasted chasing down Windows problems, and now having somebody from Microsoft even suggest that it's me, it's infuriating at the least. If this was our company's attitude we'd be long out of business.

Mr. Lamont, how would you feel if your compiler would crash even once in a while and the person in charge of the compiler would even suggest that it's your fault?! Different standards?!

I haven't tried installing SP1 for VS2008 yet because I don't find the SP process for VS reliable.

The ones for 2005 had annoying little issues and I prefer to wait until I have at least half a day with nothing to do before I try.

Those Vista dialogs and menus ... they thought they would make things better, but instead they made things different.

I've posted about something very recently before:

16randombytes.blogspot.com/.../what-do-i-hate-most-today.html

It all comes down to what is the most fundamental thing every designer should know:

*Anything that you notice is something doing something wrong.*

When you get up, grab your keys and go to your car, do you notice that you are repetitively placing one foot in front of the other in order to walk? Of course not, unless something is wrong.

Listen to all the MS fanboys crying foul.

I'm disappointed there have been no more comments. I was enjoying the tennis.

I agree. I found all the posts very entertaining. I'm not a fan boy of MS or Apple, but I did switch from Windows to OS X Leopard. Why? Different reasons but a salient one would be that I was just tired of doing everything Microsoft's way and I wanted to learn something new. (I have been developing Windows software for years.) The unix based system was a big plus as it gave me an opportunity to fine tune my unix skills. After several months, I really have learned to appreciate the differences in the systems and I must admit, currently I prefer OS X over Windows XP or Vista.

It's difficult to criticise a company that has just turned you down for a job you wanted.

Whatever your real motives, it just looks like bitterness.

Instead of moving to Java, why don't you become a Mono developer? You can keep all your skills and never have to work on a Windows machine again. The more people that get involved the better it will become.

Surely it would be a dream to work on a commercial Mono project.

Dr Phil - nice!

Why not answer the real point of the comment - on becoming a Mono developer...

Lot's of Posts on converting your applications to Mono on Linux would be great.

Not relevant?

That doesn't make any sense.

It would result in you no longer using something you hate.

You wouldn't have to use Linux, you could use OSX, which you seem to like.

The tools are inadequate??? You were just arguing that the Windows tools were inadequate...

Black and white argument?

I'm sorry, but you don’t get much more black-and-white than the title and sentiment of your post.

Personally, I don't have a big problem with Windows; but I'm certainly keen to see Mono improve and develop - hence the friendly advice. It's where I'd like to be heading.

If you're happy with your current setup, then by all means continue…

Never in my life have I been so frustrated with something as much as I have been with Vista.

Words cannot describe my frustration.

Every day the machine freezes up at least 10 times for a few minutes each time. This is a brand new machine. Meets all of the Vista score requirements. I do as many pushups as possible during each hanging period. At least I've gotten in shape!

Never, never have I hated anything as much as I hate Vista.

I love Visual Studio though.

@Steve - How do you _know_ it is Vista? You say it is a brand new machine, so could it be a hardware or third party driver problem.

That said, I fully accept that it _could_ be Vista, although I've not experienced the same problem.

I must say I love UAC. I love how, as an administrator on my own laptop which I know inside out, it, for example, pops up an alert to tell me I'm trying to launch Services after I try to launch Services. Very informative since the regularly updated Trend Micro is obviously not up to the task of holding my hand through this process. I love how it auto configures tcp/ip for my benefit as it somehow detected it's against my interest to connect reliably,consistently and speedily to Sourcesafe. I love the command line prompt command I had to scan the net for to identify the inconsistencies with Sourcesafe connectivity to trace it to this wonderful feature. I love how my screen turns blue after my laptop wakes up from hibernation to remind me to reboot by rebooting on my behalf albeit through a pesky little mem dump but lets look past that. I love how after a windows update, my laptop decides to reboot and inform me after the fact instead of before. Boot now ask questions later right? Right.  I love how when I send the error report, I get no solution or recognition of the problem. I just love everything about Vista. I really do  :-)

Sounds like you had a bad weekend!

Im Running vista Ultimate 64 at home and XP on the laptop for work.

Me and my wife plug in our phones / cameras etc.. it takes the photos, tags them, numbers them etc all very nicely.

i think you must be overlooking some of the basic settings in your fury.

I feel like Jeff. I have owned both Windows machines and Macs. I have never had a problem with my macs, I still have a mine and it runs smoothly ALL The TIME. I bought  a windows machine, with XP to do my homework in college since every one there seems to use windows. I have owned  windows machines and 5 macs in my day. EVERY single windows machine works like crap. Constant conflicts, constant problems and when it fails is never tells you. I *just* bought a high end windows for college and withihng 4 months it crashed horribley. The fixi it tech said it crashed spectacularly. He hasn't seen one go that badly in years.Complete and total hard drive wiped out with some homework. Good thing I back everything up.

And my experience in trying to get the new hardrive and all the stuff I need working has taken me a week and I still can't get anything but dial up.

So for all you jokers who like to call people names for not liking windows maybe you are lucky you just bought the ones made on a Wednesday rather than a Monday. I have had so many friends in college have their windows machine crash  lately it's an epidemic. And not all are in my particular field of study. Do you think maybe cheap Chinese labor is making crappy windows machines? I wish Bill Gates had made a REAL operating system that really worked instead of Qdos if any of you smarties remember what that means and if you don't "Quick and Dirty Operating System". Yup old Gates only cared about market share not computers that work well. I have not problem with my CS3 running correctly but can I ever get windows to do anything correctly? Sometimes. Many times is just screws itself up trying to over correct itself. Just work already!

What I know of macs is, they work intellegently and you don't spend your entire weekend trying to figure out how on earth to connect your dumb windows to your satellite DSL and don't knock me for having satellite because it is all I can get out in the country till they install real DSL. So I get to use my back up mac so I can get online via satellite and stop fooling with windows till I can get help because I have tons of homework to do and haven't time to fix a stupid windows mistake.

This is an interesting read:

www.vanwensveen.nl/.../IhateMS.html

I've been using Windoze since it was called DOS.  (Before that, I used CP/M.)  MS stuff was always mediocre, buggy, unreliable and counter-intuitive, and it still is.

Linux is superior: not perfect, but free, more reliable and more powerful.  I assume OS/X is a superior product, too.

For those of you who love Micro$haft products, nobody ever got fired for it.  MS is actually a marketing company, not a technology innovator.  They may make a few good things, but please try to understand that their stuff is mostly mediocre.  Most experienced and knowledgeable people understand this.  If you're already in bed with MS, then persevere, and you'll be fine, but you're following the turd, er... herd.

Thanks, CJ, for posting the link to the excellent review at www.vanwensveen.nl/.../IhateMS.html

I hate Windows too. It is awful!

I absolutely hate Windows with a passion. My mom got one in her room and it's the only one in the whole house, and I f?#2ing hate it. Can't wait to switch back to Macintosh. Been a fan of those babies since '96. Like I said, can't wait.

Windows (and I'm talking about any version) is a laughable piece of garbage for an OS.  I've had to use windows machines for the past 6 years at my last two jobs as a web designer.  I know my way around a computer so it's not that I'm ignorant to it's processes, but the way apps just sort of randomly stall for no apparent reason while the OS is trying to figure something out is beyond ridiculous in this day an age.  Sometimes my applications just decide to react odd for a week, 2 weeks, a month and then it fixes it self.  Example:  I had to cut vector graphics from Adobe Illustrator into Photoshop which is a task I perform all the time, well, for some reason, the completion of that task would take 2-3 minutes sometimes 5.  Why?  who knows?  After about a month it cleared up.  And don't tell me it's an Adobe issue.  I've had various random problems like that on the other windows boxes too with other applications too.  The funny thing is that I have a 450 mhz G4 mac (yeah, you read that right, 450 mhz) that is almost 10 years old and it runs my design apps better than any Windows box I've used in the past 10 years.  I do some print work but mostly web based 72dpi graphics.  I can care less about which OS I use just so long as it doesn't disrupt my work flow unfortunately Windows does in spades.

I wouldn't be spending time writing this if it just now didn't do something to frustrate me.

Oh and don't even get me started on MS Office!

I can not stand Windows any more and the reason why major supporters, despite of the total disappointment windows has been, still praise it, is not because they do not feel the pain as well, it is because they will find themselves out of a job. They don't want to learn anything beyond their scope because they are too lazy to try. I personally feel like getting a machine gun and blowing my pc into pieces every time windows crashes. Who ever came with windows should be sued big time. The agony is so great that I feel like going to a retail store that sells windows OS packages and smash them into pieces.

Hi people

Please do not reply to my comment as it's just me putting my pennies worth in as this forum interested me.

I have got a PC and a Mac but am in no way a technical genius, infact i see myself more as an advanced average user if that makes sense lol.

Now unfortunately I like both Pc and Mac for their own uses so I have no exact opinion. Bascially I have just completed my audio engineering course at Uni and what ever you may say "I" found the apple programs easier to use (despite using Cubase for 7 years.

You can argue my opinion as much as you want, I don't care how one software does something compared to another, i just prefer Logic to Cubase (suprisingly when i did my a-level in the same subject it was the other way round due to me being stubborn).

At this point i feel i'm trailing away from my main point. Macs are awesome, i don't really know much about their OS structure because nothing has gone wrong for me to fix, YET. However there are things I can't do which i can on a PC. Even to the point where i just know how to do it on a PC so i choose to do it that way (even with the same software). PC's are awesome too, know where i am, open my pc up and fix it or add to it and know to install stuff.

Despite all this, and i know PC lovers will hate this next comment, i hate vista. Things have been moved that have been in certain locations for years. Now you can't say it's me not being open minded to looking into learning the new OS as i took on OS X and after a week or 2 cracked it, but vista just has too many, not problems because experts always have an answer for them, but things i can't be bothered with is the only way i can describe then.

In summary as a standard computer user, i like windows, i like mac, but i hate vista but will certainly give the new windows OS a good chance to change my mind.

Joe Bloggs

It's not just at the user level that Windows sucks. I'm trying to setup WebDAV on a fresh Windows 2008 server for a client. I've been troubleshooting it for 5 hours now with zero luck. I'm at the point of installing a VMWare image of Windows Server 2000 on this brand new high end Dell server and letting Win2k handle the WebDAV service.

One of the things you come to quickly realize when troubleshooting Windows, at any level for any purpose, is that Windows is designed by committee with minimal real user testing or feedback. This is why options, settings, and permissions are scattered all to hell and back, making it extremely difficult to actually identify and fix any problem.

Really take a long, hard look at solutions to Windows problems posted on the web. How often do they involve some arcane series of steps that nobody outside of Microsoft could ever figure out on their own? This is a sign of a terrible, patched together OS.

I really wish at this point that Microsoft would just go under. I would much rather see Apple and the Linux community compete for users. Microsoft adds nothing but complexity and failure to modern computing. They are neither an innovator nor a leader, they're just a joke.

The only downside to Microsoft going under is that their developers would scatter to other organizations and possibly spread the Microsoft culture of complexity, mediocrity, and confusion like a virus. It would be best for the industry if Microsoft went under and their developer pool forbidden from continuing to work in the industry.

Yeah, that's how strongly I hate Microsoft products, and how much contempt I have for their employees who push this trash on the world.

@ Herman - I completely agree with your opinion. Windows Vista is OK for beginners, although for more experienced users it can be the most annoying thing in the world.

There are TONS of obsolete notifications and pop-ups that only get in the way of experienced users. Vista's "user-friendliness" may be useful to a certain degree, but for many people it only distracts and frustrates them.

I'm sorry you've become another victim of Micro$oft, it happens.

And while most people flaming in these comments are citing your install procedure or experience, I don't have either. My new laptop came with Vista pre-installed and no re-install CD (It's apparent that the microslouch team has tightened security by not including CDs that could be used for *gasp* installing Vista on a machine). Anyway, from the FIRST time I tried to boot it up its gotten a BSOD (ugly BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH) and EVERY single time since. The laptop was practically useless (but a great paperweight, and I thought they were joking).

Did I press the power button the wrong way? Go ahead, tell me I did.

Linux, FTW.

OMG, I reallly hate windows. All the viruses and sh*t? And all the unexplained errors? All the crashes? MAC OSX doesnt need a Virus Scan. Mac is the best! all the way.

Windows isn't always bad. Depending on what you call windows. Windows 7 gives me gas and a headache, so does vista. If you go through a million little tricks and disable damn near every piece of bloated crap that's been added to make it easier, more automated, then it will do exactly what you want, quickly, efficiently etc. The issue with windows is that the vanilla prospect is slowly being bread out of it. Setting up 7 today at the office, it took half a dozen restarts to get windows to stop re-attaching ipv6 to the damned net card. It was automatically fixing it for me. Making my life easier and all. My hope, stupid of me as it was, was that 7 would allow me to slick one button, have a classic start menu and no useless guessamation about what it thought I was doing. Stupid me.

I am so frustrated.  Once again, (and I might say, often), Microsofts lousy software has failed me.  I wanted to put my computer back to factory settings, so I followed the instructions in the pop up window. Imade backup disks; I made 7 and labeled them exactly as the pop up windows specified. Then I set my computer back to factory settings. When I put the backup disks in my E drive, some of the disks were blank and others could not be accessed. I lost semi-valuable information. When is Microsoft going to get it- or will someone run you out of business before you get it. Stop having programmers designing the instruction etc for the average person using your products. Few of us are programmers- so stop letting programmers write instruction etc that we non-programmers must follow. Programmers write software that most of us are clueless about how write. On the other hand, programmers are clueless about how we average people think. PLEASE! OH, PLEASE consult only with us everyday people when writing instruction, or testing how well people interact with the program. Programmers should be banned from all these discussions regarding these and other such topics.

Programmers should have no input at all into how to set up the things that we, the average person, must use; they don't think like the rest of us. Ban them from all discussions and meetings regarding public interfacing with the programs, then deliver the instructions to them, and then tell them exactly how to do the layout for menus, the language in pop-up boxes, and anything else that the public tells you. Finally, keep sending the proto types back to them, until they do it the way we want done, and not the way their creative brains want to do it.

You might start with making your feedback page for Windows simpler to use.  I went there and finally gave up and decided to email from Google.  I know, I know, the people who designed the page are taking it personally, because I could not easily use it.  Other people such as google get it-  make the sites we use simple, really simple for we who are ignorant. 

Please!, Please, have the programmers swallow their pride. Tell them to do what they do best- write the code for programmers, And let the rest of us do what we do best- we know what we find user friendly and are willing to tell you.

Signed:

I just lost more data, and wasted a lot of time.