I HATE Microsoft

Time after time they have betrayed me. Most recently, we needed to restore our computer to its original factory settings because a bunch of programs refused to work anymore. Neither reinstallation, tech support, nor system restore could do anything for the situation. So, I went to the ol' Microsoft "settings and transfer" wizard to make the restoration easier.

Trash. Turns out, it didn't back up both profiles, just one. And it didn't back up all our programs, just Microsoft's. For example, we prefer Firefox for our browser. It dutifully backed up IE's settings and ignored Firefox's and Opera's. Well, I should have expected that, right? Well, I specifically went to their website trying to find out if it would get all the profiles and programs and I found NOTHING. Their help files are absolutely ludicrous and have been since the advent of Windows.

Trying to restore Outlook was an even greater joy. I put phrase after phrase into the help box and it would constantly access the internet to pull to the "latest" information and bring back absolutley nothing of relevance or use.

Restarting Media Player reminded me of one of my pet peeves about all software vendors--they all put shortcuts in every conceivable location across your hard drive and change your program associations so if you open any kind of media remotely associated with their software (even if it was CREATED in different software) it will open in Media Player. Some companies go so far as having a "check all" button for file associations but requiring you to uncheck every box manually rather than providing a "check none" button.

Reinstalling Microsoft Money is the kind of tribulation I can only hope builds character, because it sure didn't help my blood pressure. They make it difficult to figure out during installation how to avoid installing the half-gig of video and audio files to show you how to use the program. Did they consider people may actually already know and want to bypass their bloat? No! In fact, despite my going to the trouble of disabling the audio and video installation, I find every time I open a feature for the first time, there's that grating voice telling me in the most obvious terms how to do what I've done for years.

Did I mention I hate Microsoft?

Windows Media Center software? Trash. I paid extra money for a remote control that would supposedly control audio and video on the computer. Well, it does if you only intend to use 2 of the 65 buttons. Stop and play usually work. Rewind, fast forward, and the other buttons: not so much. But my biggest gripe is that when you put in an audio CD it cheerily offers to rip it to your hard drive, but only using Windows Media Audio format. You have to pay extra for the mpeg codec--despite that we have the mpeg encoder installed on our operating system from other software. Microsoft, apparently will have nothing to do with my legally owned existing codecs--I have to buy it from THEM.

You may have heard all the hype about Vista, the next Windows version. Well, I certainly hope they get around to fixing the problem I had while using Windows Explorer the other day. I was deleting folders in the left panel while the right panel showed the contents. It deleted all the contents first, but then gave me an error message because the folder was not empty--apparently unable to delete the hidden thumbnail index file because it was a protected OS file. They've had HOW many years to fix the most basic aspects of the operating system? I don't care if Windows Vista makes my computer stand up and do a gig, I don't want more of the same crap if I can't delete a folder without their technology having a breakdown.

Internet explorer has a new beta version out--from what I understand it just steals all the innovations from Firefox and sets your browser search to MSN automatically not giving you the specific option during setup to choose another provider--say, Google, the most popular search engine in the world. Well, if you can't beat 'em, bully them, I guess. Seems to be the long standing MS mantra.

This is one of the largest and richest companies in the world right? How can they consistently and bitterly disappoint me with nearly everything they do? And their stock has been going down... I wonder why?