Microsoft Do you trust them?

Real World Microsoft

In the cold war we employed espionage tactics to prevent progress in foreign countries, but now the Americans have a company to do it for them.  All over the world Microsoft creep into our computers at will and do their damndest.  We should be up in arms.  Why do we let Microsoft get away with it?  What is the real cost of what they do? 

 One Friday in October, Microsoft issued security updates for Windows XP computers.  (Mainstream support for XP Service Pack 3 ended some time ago, and we now only have a few months of security patches to go before XP will not be supported at all).  One update was for Internet Explorer 8 and around half a dozen were Windows core updates.  One of my clients is a designer providing graphic ‘wraps’ for vehicles.  He is a sole trader with three PCs, one of which is dedicated to performing the printing and scoring of these vinyl artworks before they are applied to vehicles.  The second PC is for design and the third, a Windows 7 machine, for email and accounts.  Late on Friday afternoon, after backing up, he left a design open and unsaved on his desktop, (you know what’s coming don’t you), and went home to his family weekend.  PCs were left switched on and would hibernate or sleep.

 On Monday he called me as his printing PC would not boot.  He thought there had been a power cut as strange messages were appearing on two of his computers.  I called round late on Mon afternoon and could not get to the bottom of what might have happened.  The critical printing computer would not boot beyond a message informing us that urlmon.dll had failed to load.  Safe mode didn’t work either, (I can hear you asking!) and, once the message was clicked, just a pale blue screen was left with nothing on it all.  It wasn’t the Blue Screen of Death, just a background colour.

 Suffice to say that determining the cause of the problem took an hour on site, a couple of hours that evening (I took the PC home) and a further hour the next day.  I was actually getting nowhere until at the last minute before wiping the machine and starting again, the internet warned me that Windows updates might cause this or similar errors.  Jiggery pokery followed while we found a way using Ctrl+Alt+Del and the ‘run’ command to get to the add remove program’s update section and remove the various updates from the previous Friday.  A reboot gave us a perfect working computer.

 All was becoming clear.  Once the ‘automatic’ updates for Windows XP had applied themselves they had restarted two of the three PCs leaving the design PC without the design program running.  This promptly lost the work and returned to the desktop as if there had been a power outage and reboot, but with the added ‘bonus’ of getting the unwitting user back to his shiny desktop.  The second PC, controlling the very expensive two metre graphics printer restarted too, but the updates had failed leaving us, not with a sparkling new desktop, but a dead machine.  No taskbar, no icons, no nothing, just an OK button to remove the error message, then an absolute vacuum, coloured with a serene pale blue screen.

I had thought the problems might be virus related, that there might indeed have been a power cut and corruption of important boot data, that the hard disk could be failing, that swapping out the RAM might give us a bootable PC.  Removing the hard disk from the PC and checking it when connected inside another clean computer proved that all was well with the disk.  Swapping out the RAM gave exactly the same useless PC when booted.  Replacing urlmon.dll failed to give us any hope either.  System Restore might have worked, but it had been turned off on what was a nearly full hard disk.

 How can re-starting a computer with no user input be a good thing?  Where is the option to halt the restart if anything needs saving in the workspace?  Where is the warning that updates are about to be applied and might be the cause of future problems as well as supposedly fixing insecure software?  What gives Microsoft the right to break in to our offices and cock-up a working system?  Why do we put up with it at all, and at what cost?

 

Printing time lost                                 1.7 days

Design time lost                                  1 hr

Technician time                                   2 visits, and 4 hours

 It would have been cheaper to buy a new PC, load software and settings, recover backups and get rolling again.  (Do you think there might be something in that argument?  Perhaps…..  There’s no harm in selling a new piece of kit, with a new set of software licences is there?)

Any apologies forthcoming?  Anybody admitting responsibility?  Any promise not to do it again?  Any phone support?  Any cash incentive?  Any care, any thought, any useful screen messages?  Anybody interested at all?.................................Big Fat No!!

Multiply the lost time and costs of, say, £400 by, say, 10,000 small business users.  (There are getting on for 3 million sole traders in the UK) and you get to £4,000,000, and, for the most part, nobody even knows it’s a Microsoft issue.  You bet your life Microsoft are keeping quiet about it too!  That’s one little issue on one day.  Do you think there could there be a few others?  As long as cash is being laid out for new hardware, and therefore necessarily software, who in the material world gives a damn?