Friday, December 16, 2005

Windows Support

Got a new piece of brilliance from Windows today in the office. Windows XP Professional is very good at dealing with most things you throw at it. Give it a corporate network and it will recognise it automatically. Today it decided to no longer recognise a network card. Help said try uninstalling - it wouldn't allow that: "required for boot-up". Then Help said "update drivers from the internet" - bloody brilliant considering that the PC "knows" that internet access is via the corporate network and that there is no network card installed. Doh!

This is just another in a long series of great messages. Try: "USB device error - click here to continue", when the only USB device is the mouse. And how about the MS-DOS classic when booting a PC with no keyboard: "Keyboard Error - Press F1 to continue".

There are some brilliant guys at Microsoft. It's a shame the ones who write the error messages have never manned a help desk.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Heheh, you are right. One of my all time favourite is: "Checking for hard disc consistency". Its so advanced, so technological, so future, its Microsoft singing us songs and giving us bull!

Harry said...

Actually, as a long-time techie, I remember the days when disk checking was actually important. You're right that it's annoying though. All other Windows "maintenance" is done on the fly. Why oblige us to wait for a disk scan on start-up?