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Microsoft—The Never Ending Story of Frustration, Microsoft—The Never Ending Story of Frustration, wait, wait am I caught in a loop here?

Microsoft—The Never Ending Story of Frustration, Microsoft—The Never Ending Story of Frustration, wait, wait am I caught in a loop here?

As far as why MS is frustrating, well every time I have to do a reinstall of something I bought and paid for and it is so laborious, I want to scream. This is referring to the crashed XP hard drive of a recent blog. If an end user falls in the Microsoft forest does anyone hear him?

Also after an automatic MS update I had an older MS XP Multimedia system boot into a this must be verified before continuing screen. I say fine, verify, and it goes out to the Internet and says this system has been verified and it restarts and says this system must be verified and infinity loops. When the verify you’re legit thing came out, this system passed. (as it should have) Wonder what was in the automatic update that made a system that was running just fine go into loop de loops?

I went to Microsoft’s site on an adjoining system and it told me to boot in safe mode on the loopy system and come back to their site and I could run an automated correction of my registry. Yeah, right, I go into safe mode and the same loop, just keeps on running. Now the MS site did give laborious instructions for manually changing whatever screw up in the registry their automatic update did but I have to wonder how important the loopy system really is. I only boot it to do the updates because I can’t bear to trash it. It is a P3 that served me well and I thought it was a good back up machine. It was a beefy P3 since I used it with the XP Multimedia and it ran a pretty spiffy demo on a big screen back demo of our HTPC. (home theater personal computer) So keeping it running is far more sentimental than practical. By now only true geeks and serious want to be’s are feeling any empathy for someone is maintaining a computer out of sentiment, but hey, once a geek always a geek.

Bottom line is if at some point I am totally bored, have all my blogs up to date, it is raining and I can’t play golf, all my books are read and my grandkids can’t come over an play with me, I may blow off the XP multimedia and install a copy of XP home on it. The XP multimedia CD and key are in the same limbo my one copy of XP Pro is that I mentioned in a previous blog. Once I install that XP Home though, I am out of my last remaining stock of XP. Too bad, as much as the OS bothers me, I do have a long term love hate relationship with it that I really haven’t developed with Vista. Of course I only have one Vista system and I have 6 5 XP systems still working.

So Microsoft, your automatic updates have claimed another victim, destroyed a long term, emotional relationship with an OS that you have abandoned and annoyed me once again. Of course one of the nice things about being retired is I don’t get annoyed with MS as often. When I was running my computer business, I was constantly, consistently and sometimes volcanically annoyed with Microsoft.

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