The Evils of Microsoft

 Over the years I have spent many days trying to get Microsoft updates to work if not having to totally reboot my system and taking almost a week to rearrange, not to mention the costs of getting replacement software.

Every update is a twenty four hour process. 

The latest 24H2 update was a massive mess. My system crashed two days ago, then I thought it may need a total reboot, a real mess, but I saw MS had sent out an update to the 24H2 that would eliminate some of the messes MS created. 

Now it seems I have a workable system but for how long.

Sooner or later MS will be hit with a massive class action suit for reckless endangerment. 

Perhaps DOGE could help here as well!

I Really, Really, Really Hate Microsoft

 Yesterday was update Tuesday. As happens at least monthly if not more often, Microsoft downloads updates. Now it takes 2-3 hours to download them, then 2-3 hours ate least to install them, then 2-3 hours to reboot the system, after multiple failures. That adds up to 9 hours wasted waiting for Microsoft junk to get loaded. Make that for 1 billion users and we have up to 10 billion human hours wasted monthly or 12 billion per year! It destroys productivity. I was unable to join a Board meeting, files were messed up etc!

Does Microsoft care? No way. If we value out time at $100 per our, a low number, the cost is $1.2 trillion a year! It appears that Microsoft does not care.

These Folks are really Incompetent!

 Again our nemesis at Microsoft is crashing millions of computers destroying billions of hours of human productivity. As PC World notes:

Microsoft is having a bad month. Not long after the Windows 11 24H2 update began rolling out, the issues have just been piling on. At first it was drivers crashing PCs and mouse cursors disappearing. Then it was tons of undeletable data left behind after updating. Some users are even running into dead internet connections and network issues. Then came Patch Tuesday on October 8, where we got two updates that primarily address security vulnerabilities: update KB5044284 for users on Windows 11 24H2 and update KB5044285 for users on older versions Windows 11 23H2 and Windows 11 22H2. Some users are also reporting that Windows Update gets stuck in the update process at 40 percent, while others say that their updates get stuck somewhere between 90 and 95 percent. After waiting several minutes without progress, Windows undoes the update and try again.

 When will this stop! Have they no shame?

 

Incompetence Continues

PC World warns about the latest gross incompetence from Microsoft. Namely the latest update crashes computers all over the place. Specifically they note:

Last week, Microsoft released an optional Windows 11 update that brought some new features to the Start menu, taskbar, and lock screen. Unfortunately, that update is wreaking havoc for some users. As reported by Windows Latest, after installing Windows update KB5043145, you may not be able to restart your PC as you’ll be hit with the infamous Blue Screen of Death or the less common Green Screen of Death. In some cases, BitLocker recovery may also be triggered. Microsoft has confirmed this as a known issue, stating that all users on Windows 11 versions 23H2 and 22H2 can be affected. As of right now, Microsoft has taken down the update.

 This is a continuing process demonstrating in my opinion and my experience gross incompetence and possibly negligence. These problems are pandemic with Microsoft products. Years of lost productivity. Updates lock down my systems for a day at a time. Thus I need several back up systems to work around Microsoft.

Perhaps sometime someone may take action. So beware of updates!

 

 

The Horror, the Horror

 Well it is Friday 13th, January. Always has been a bad day at Black Rock...the movie not the woke investment folks. But Microsoft again had a Friday 13th update, yep, 6 hours of my time on just one machine with the software those morons in Seattle produced. I have seven more machines to go.

MS is buying some AT gamut, so we can kiss that one farewell. It seems MS has the proclivity to take something simple and make it impossible. A Gatesian holdover perhaps.

Well back to the updates.....

Malevolent Microsoft

 Here is the latest. W11 Cumulative Update KB5020044 performs the following truly evil deeds.

1. It takes 6 hours to install. You are thus non-productive for that time.

2. I crashes the system thus taking another 2 hours to reboot. This usually occurs at a peak time.

3. I use Task Manager, a small and old tool that allows one to see what MS SW is messing up the system by using memory, disk space, CPU time etc. Now the evil doers at MS have decided to up date this with a "black screen" Nice but the text is also black. Get it, black on black. Try and read it! NOT

4. Thus for the past 24 hours I have messed up a few of our systems with this useless change. BTW we just has one on 11/8/22. So why do we need another mess 22 days later! These true evil doers cannot seem to get anything stable. Just when you get settled they come up with some other moronic act.

BTW, MS has the standard ploy of making their customers debug their products! There should be a basic product that is safe and not changed. Let the changes be an upgrade for those who want the special effects. I don't.

The Menace of Microsoft

 

In the past few weeks MS has made me go through 13 upgrades as noted above. This does not include other stuff. Each upgrade takes 5-6 hours of computer time between downloading, installing and then getting all the other files to work so I can do some productive work. That is a total of almost 80 hours! Now there are a total of 8 systems so we have 640 hours!

All I want is a word processor, spread sheet, web browser and email! What a wast of humanity!

The Horror, the Horror!

 Yep, Microsoft at it again, W11, 22H2. It takes 11 hours to download and "install". The when you reboot that is another 3 hours. Then it is 5 more hours before all the Microsoft programs readjust. That is 19 hours before I got back to where I was I think.

In my opinion and in my experience these are justly called evil doers!

W10 21H1 Crashes System

Microsoft verges on the demonic. I tried to update to the new release and 12 hours later after a clean W10 reinstall, thousands of dollars of lost SW and fortunately I had backup after backup but not much of the SW and I am still reloading. It will take another few days and most likely required a new system just in case. There is no recourse but just hours spent working around the Microsoft junk. 

OK 30 hours later here is what happened:

1. Tried to load 21H1

2. Got blue screen

3. Tried to recover from screen commands

4. No good

5. Had recover USB, it worked but installed a brand new W10 system!

6. Thus I had to reload all SW

7. I had massive backups so loaded files

8. Then had to BUY new MS packages upwards of a grand!

9. Loaded all other SW thus far

10 Still making patches

11. Blocking any future MS updates!

MS is clearly one of the worst if not the worst company even envisioned. You pay for their mistakes again and again. My personal advice is do not update the SW.

UPDATE: It is now 80+ hours and still loading old SW. I gather I am not alone with this colossal mess. Seem MS has withdrawn auto updates with 21H1. In my opinion, MS has incompetent quality control resulting in irreparable harm to a massive number. Imagine them in healthcare!

16 Hours with Microsoft: The Belly of the Inferno

It started a day ago. I got the notice that my two machines were ready for upgrading W10. So stop all you are doing and start the process. My main machine takes about six hours. From the moment you say begin to the moment when you smile and have is working again, you sit and watch, like paint drying, hoping the morons at Microsoft have not released another one of their previous terrors which took over several of my machines a few releases back.

Then I had the bright idea. I would buy an update to Visio on an old machine. It is my machine I use when going to New Hampshire. It worked fine but the Visio which I use a lot was circa 2007 and ran like a dog. So began my journey into Hell, Microsoft Hell. After three hours I had managed to pay the exorbitant amount and it was loaded. Then I noted that in the process of loading it removed all my Office programs, Word, Excel etc. Gone! Lost! Destroyed. Now what.

Bright idea number one was to load an old version of Office from an XP. Bad idea. It was free but a mess. Oh well, back to Microsoft and download Office 2019. Not that 365 thing which costs a fortune. Pay another fee and try this down load about six times until it works. Total time, seven hours! I may be getting out of the Inferno, I prayed, I prayed a lot, you see when dealing with Microsoft prayer is your only outlet, only God can get it to work.

Finally after a cumulative of 16 hours in Hell I can return to my desk and get some work done. 

You see, the characters at Microsoft in my opinion and in my experience are near to the devil incarnate. Nothing is simple and directions are written in some extraterrestrial syntax. 

 Oh yes, the motto on the Microsoft web site should follow Dante, "Abandon all hope ye who enter".

This is written on Google. Let's hope they never hire a Microsoft character. Oh and yes, I hear the Microsoft characters want to tell us how to take care of ourselves. I would be very wary, or start praying a lot!

W10 Again

My ongoing complaints about Microsoft and especially W10. The latest update crashed my system. But on the good side I found that the Media Creation Tool worked great. It totally redid the W10 environment and used it on old systems frozen in an endless loop on some three year old update and it is now current.

However I had to spend 22 hours of my life solving this. How many things on my cancer studies did I miss and perhaps how many putatively unnecessary deaths occurred, in my opinion, due to this incompetence.

Microsoft and Control of Their Customer

They did it again. Microsoft snuck in and rearranged my desk top. You see, if you are like me, your desk is a bit messy as you work, but underneath that mess you really know where everything is.

For example you have imprinted in your brain the Excel icon when you go through your daily process of working on a few spreadsheets. The same for Word. Massive visual dissonance, smashing through my limbic system.

But wait! Sometime in the past twenty four hours Microsoft snuck into my computer and changed the icons, reshuffled my entire life! I never knew they were even here. I automatically turned to my Excel icon, GONE! There was this stranger, in fact three strangers, looking up at me. Who were these new icons, dare I click on them, were they Russian plants, Chinese intruders?

NO! They were Microsoft letting me know they were in total control. I kind of am reminded of this every time I try to work on an older machine in my lab but it keeps trying to update a W10 from 1703 to whatever. I think of the mega hours/days spent trying to work around another Microsoft blunder.

But my sacred desktop, never before have these brutes tried that. But now I know how to work around them. I saw where they hid these things. I wonder if I can revert to my old desk top, perhaps I will try.

This act is akin to say the movement of a mass of tubas into the string section of a symphonic orchestra, or the placement of axes on the surgical tray in a neurosurgical suite.  It not only creates visual dissonance but disrupts one's total mindset.

The real problem is that Microsoft does not have the common courtesy to even ask no less let you know what happened. The just come in an rearrange stuff. It is like that old college roommate who had the annoying tendency to move all your stuff around for his own personal benefit.

Bur remember, Microsoft is always watching you! Like the Devil himself!

Microsoft At It Again?

It seems that whoever is running Microsoft really must hate the customers, in my opinion. The most recent disaster is the Windows 10 KB4023057 download. You see this was done several months ago but the wizards at Microsoft tried again and the result is failures to update.

One of the web sites discussing this notes:

It looks like Windows 10 KB4023057 has been re-released and the update appears to be causing unexpected issues on some machines. We have come across some isolated reports from Twitter and Reddit which revealed that Windows 10 KB4023057 installation fails. A thread on Reddit claims that the system downloaded the update but the installation of KB4023057 failed with error 0x80070643....“Windows Update just tried (and failed) to install a “KB4023057″ update just now. I’m wondering, what on earth does it do? I can’t seem to find a post on the official Microsoft website about it, and any news articles I find of it (from MONTHS ago) talk about it messing with files in the user directory and network settings,” the Redditor explained.

Just think how many billions of hours are wasted remedying  Microsoft's blunders. They have no shame, no credibility, in my opinion. It really in my opinion calls for a legal action of some type. So far Android has never been such a mess.

Now Who Said This?

For those whose lives were nearly shattered by upgrading to W10 1809 and losing all their data, for those who have their W10 machine frozen somewhere between W10 upgrades, for the eons wasted trying to figure out how to fix a Microsoft problem comes an interview at Harvard, of course where else, which notes:

Whether we like it or not, the public is increasingly turning not to their elected officials, but to the heads of major corporations for leadership on important and difficult issues. Perhaps because of partisan gridlock, perhaps because politicians seem to pay more attention when Big Business talks, rightly or wrongly, people expect today’s CEOs to pick up the ball. That’s both good and bad for society, according to Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer. “I think it’s not only good, but fundamentally important that companies have a conscience,” he said during a talk with Harvard Business Review ...People, especially younger workers, want to work for businesses that operate conscientiously, and as companies expand globally, particularly those in creative and intellectual property sectors, it becomes not just a nice thing to do, but an imperative for corporate survival. “You better have a conscience,” Smith said.

One could reasonably ask in my opinion what planet this tin eared executive has just arrived from. Is there any conscience for what damage in my opinion has been done to the masses of computer users with this W10 disaster. Worse yet, what is to come from this behemoth as it rolls our newer and more useless in my opinion software. People in glass houses.......

Microsoft, Arendt, and The Banality of Evil

Hannah Arendt wrote her work on the banality of evil. It is worth reading, banal being dull, unimaginative. Microsoft has apparently issued its latest update of the computer destroying Windows 10. I personally have two dead laptops resulting from this monster. In this case, in my opinion and based upon my experience, the evil is the destruction of hardware, software, most importantly peoples' productive time. One should question how many human years of creativity are lost due to the shabby software handed down from this company.

PCWorld announces the latest destroyer of cyber entities. They note:

Microsoft is slamming the brakes on the Windows 10 October 2018 Update’s rollout. The upgrade became available during the company’s Surface event on Tuesday, but in the days that followed, numerous users across the web reported that the transition deleted massive chunks of data. User profiles and entire folders full of files went missing in some cases and rolling back the upgrade didn’t restore them. Now Microsoft is temporarily halting the October 2018 Update’s distribution due to the issue. “We have paused the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809) for all users as we investigate isolated reports of users missing some files after updating,” Microsoft’s support page for build 1809 says.

Release after release destroys computers and data. This time in a real big way. Perhaps Microsoft should hire some competent software testers. Really, it is not hard. The company seems to be in free fall.

One suspects that sooner or later there will be a massive class action suit, despite the unread user agreements. Think "contract of adhesion".

One is almost forced to use Microsoft. It is in my opinion a monopoly if ever there was one. It consistently issues updates that cause in my opinion and in my experience irreparable harm. And it appears that it just does not care!

1709 Failed

I have an older laptop that was upgraded to Windows 10 from W7. The last upgrade, 1709, failed. I paid not attention since it is a spare system and updates to the new releases usually mess up a few dozen things anyhow. That is Microsoft. But have a few spare moments I went to see if I could remedy the problem. Solution, just go to Google, NEVER and I mean NEVER go to Microsoft. There on Google I found thousands of people with the same problem.

Then, Microsoft has some "Engineer" telling folks how to remedy this. The best part of the response was:

Method 4:

1. Open registry editor by running regedit.exe
2. Back up the registry first before making changes to it
3. Navigate to HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager
4. Check if PendingFileRenameOperations exists under the Session Manager key
5. If it exists, please remove it
6. Restart computer and check if issue persists

If the issue persists,  please follow the steps below and send the CBS log to the e-mail address in private message.

1. Rename the CBS.log(%systemroot%\Logs\CBS\CBS.log) to CBS.old
2. Manually update the computer again and restart computer if needed
3. Send the new generated CBS.log.

If anything is unclear, please feel free to let me know.

 Now for those of you who would dare to change a Registry, let me tell you, it is the holy of holies in Windows OS. It is where Microsoft places millions of landmines. Make one small change and not all others required and CRASH! Yep, down goes the machine and unrecoverable.

So my question is: where is the Class Action suit lawyers in this case. It has likely taken more productivity from our economy than anything Congress could screw up! 

If Microsoft were a real company in a competitive market they would not last a femto second. They would have to remedy this. But alas, we all know where this is going. No where. Pity!

Beware W10 Upgrade

Like last years "upgrade" MS again messes everything up. Printers down, software needs re-configuring, and all the "goodies" must be manually disabled. In my opinion these are truly evil folks. All I want is my computer to run what I use it for. No games, just work. Is there any way that these demons can just stop it! An operating system is really simple, did one fifty years ago. Okay, a bit more complicated, but folks, stop it with all the crashes!

Hint: Stop any "upgrades". Unless you really like spending days fixing what they did.

Microsoft Does It Again

In my opinion Microsoft is truly evil. Now that is my personal opinion. I have studied the meaning of evil and especially the work of Augustine and therein I believe I may have a valid opinion.

You see they update W10 again, 1703 "upgrade". Yes, a full complete, five hour upgrade. Dead in the water. Then they moved things around. You see, after 3/4ths of a century I know where things are on my desk. Pens in the right hand drawer, stapler to the top right, phone on top left. And so on. But what do these people do? Change everything as well as the location of everything. I guess they never had a mother who told them to put things back where they belong! The move things, not big moves, but evil little moves.

Then the upgrade kills off expensive software. Drivers do not work, files messed up, etc. One gets to spend a full day trying hopelessly to rearrange your desk! Yet every few months these people change your desk. For the better? Hardly.

Microsoft and Cancer

From the folks who brought Windows 10 upgrade we now have it that they want to cure cancer. From Microsoft they say:

Microsoft’s research labs around the world, computer scientists, programmers, engineers and other experts are trying to crack some of the computer industry’s toughest problems, from system design and security to quantum computing and data visualization. A subset of those scientists, engineers and programmers have a different goal: They’re trying to use computer science to solve one of the most complex and deadly challenges humans face: Cancer. And, for the most part, they are doing so with algorithms and computers instead of test tubes and beakers.

They continue:

One approach is rooted in the idea that cancer and other biological processes are information processing systems. Using that approach the tools that are used to model and reason about computational processes – such as programming languages, compilers and model checkers – are used to model and reason about biological processes. The other approach is more data-driven. It’s based on the idea that researchers can apply techniques such as machine learning to the plethora of biological data that has suddenly become available, and use those sophisticated analysis tools to better understand and treat cancer. Both approaches share some common ground – including the core philosophy that success depends on both biologists and computer scientists bringing their expertise to the problem.

Trusting these folks to cure anything is highly unrealistic. Just try seeking help on a Microsoft site. No way. It was not until Google came along that people could wend their way through the horrific complexity of Microsoft. Customer friendly? Not. So guess how they would treat patients! 

Just a simple example. Almost 2 months after the Anniversary W10 release, one cannot use their H.264 cameras, a global standard. Would Microsoft perhaps blind the world! How could anyone realistically trust these people to do anything in medicine!

The Gang Who Can't Code Straight!

Microsoft is at it again with W10. As Ars Technica reports:

As if that weren't bad enough, Microsoft has pushed out a bad update that breaks important PowerShell functionality. The update, KB3176934, is the latest cumulative update for the Anniversary Update and was released on August 23. It breaks two key PowerShell features: Desired State Configuration (DSC), which is used to deploy configurations to systems, and implicit remoting, a feature that makes it easier to use PowerShell commands that are installed on remote systems. The reason that these things have broken is remarkable. The Cumulative Update doesn't include all the files it needed to. One missing file breaks DSC; a second missing file breaks implicit remoting. A revised package that includes these missing files will be released on August 30; although Microsoft recognizes that the problem exists, it isn't apparently important enough to rush out a fix, so it'll have to wait for the next Tuesday.

Yep, a bad and broken update causing billions of dollars of down time!

Microsoft notes:

Known issues in this update
Issue 1

After you apply this update and then start a remote Windows PowerShell session, the functionality to import a module (implicit remoting) no longer works. 

Issue 2

After you apply this update, PowerShell Desired State Configuration no longer works. Users will receive an "Invalid Property" error message when they run any DSC operation. 

 And then follow this to Microsoft:

On August 23, Windows update KB3176934 released for Windows Client. Due to a missing .MOF file in the build package, the update breaks DSC. All DSC operations will result in an “Invalid Property” error. In addition, due to a missing binary in the build package the update breaks PowerShell implicit remoting. Implicit remoting is a PowerShell feature where PowerShell commands work on a remote session instead of locally. Specifically, importing a remote session no longer works.

 One has to ask if there are any adults in Seattle. Perhaps it is some form of massive substance excess. The solution starts with a new CEO who has the customer in mind! Where is the Board, that is the problem. There will be massive class action suits sooner or later!