RANT: Another reason to hate Microsoft

[Lydia Leftcoast]

I originally planned to get a cable Internet connection when I moved. It's what I had in Portland, and I was very happy with it.

Okay, so I call the cable company out to my new apartment in Minneapolis, and the cable guy says, "With the outlet being here, and your office being there, no can do without drilling holes in the walls."

Manager: "Like hell he'll drill holes in the wall."

So, I call up Qwest for DSL. Despite my trepidation, I sign up for their cheap deal of MSN Internet service.

This is turning out to be a mistake. I get their modem and software in the mail after Qwest has turned on the DSL line.

The modem doesn't work. I spend two separate half hours with support trying to get it to work. It finally turns out that I can't, after all, have two devices plugged into the same jack, so I have to run out and buy a phone extension cord and run it behind doors into the next room. Now the modem works--sort of. All the lights are supposed to be a steady green. One of mine is a flashing orange, but the support person says that's okay.

Okay, so I try to set up Entourage (the e-mail program that comes with Office, the one I've been using that has all my folders of mail from clients) with msn. Doesn't work. I call Support again.

"Oh, you can't use Entourage with msn."
"Why not? It's a Microsoft product!"
"It works only with Entourage for OS X."

Grumble-grumble. So I put up with Outlook Express, which has some annoying peculiarities, but I'm a good sport, even if it does mean going back into Entourage if I want to retrieve an old message from a client.

There are some disturbing incidents. I temporarily become unable to send messages. Friends amd clients phone or send notes to my alternate e-mail address saying that their messages to me bounced.

But those are sporadic incidents (although still too numerous for the first ten days).

This morning, everything is normal. I leave to go visit my rellies, and when I return, there's no mail. (I'm on enough lists and have enough correspondents that this is an odd occurrence.)

I have to write to a client. I compose the message, hit Send, and get an error message. I get error messages for five hours.

Finally, I call Support. The nice young man (they're all nice young men) investigates my e-mail account and finds out that my mailbox has overflowed.

Since I have Outlook Express programmed to download mail ever 30 minutes, this is puzzling.

Actually, he says, the MSN accounts are all really Hotmail accounts, so messages are left on the server unless you specify otherwise.

We go to Hotmail, and I delete all the messages that are cluttering up the server.

(I'm paying that much money for a Hotmail account?) So I ask the nice young man how I make sure that no messages are left on the server.

He tells me to pull down the Tools menu, click on Accounts, and go to the Options tab, where there will be a place to check or uncheck "Leave copy of mail on server."

I do as he says, right through clicking on Options....and there's nothing there.

The nice young man tells me that I need a new version of Outlook Express for Mac. 5.0.6 instead of 5.0.5. So I download it, install it, and open it.

I click Tools menu-Accounts-Options....and there's nothing there, but by this time, I'm no longer on the phone with the nice young man. So I go to Help. The Help handbook tells me exactly the same thing that the nice young man did: Tool menu-Accounts-Options. Only there are no Options.

So get this--the Help menu for a program is telling me to do something that is not in the program.

(Note: Entourage does have Options, but I can't use it with MSN. Go fiture.)

About one hour into the mess, I phone the local Macintosh store to ask about Mac.com. I find out that it needs OS X, which I won't get until I buy my next computer (the current one doesn't have enough memory). I tell him part of my MSN hassle (most of which has not yet happened at that point). He recommends a local ISP for DSL service, saying that it's Mac-friendly, that it's friendly in general, and extremely reliable, and that he has used it for two years without any trouble.

I shall have to investigate this other ISP. Despite the niceness of the MSN Support staff, I don't feel that I should patronize such a poor-quality outfit.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. Truth be known...

It is entirely likely that your nice young man was in either Bangalore or Hyderabad. As in India. And he was working out of a book of troubleshooting flow charts.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. The first one I talked to ten days ago

had some sort of an accent, but the other three sounded American.

But I shouldn't have to call Support four times in ten days. As a Mac user, I'm not accustomed to that!

[otohara]

3. Qwest DSL - We Had Serious

problems...when we switched to earthlink, they disappeared. Now today, I hate Mircosoft along with you, they disconnected my extra storage account, because they forgot to charge my card back in February, now I'm having Internet Explorer problems, all day today and more tomorrow...

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. My actual Internet connection is fine

I have never had any trouble accessing Websites since the modem problem was straightened out.

But the MSN mail service is crazy-making!

[Rooktoven]

5. A real internet provider

would allow any mail client, on any platform. I hate to say it, but you are paying the price of doing business with the devil.

[wtmusic]

6. Typical

Inferior software, inferior hardware, inferior service.

[OKNancy]

9. Not always

I was on Microsoft tech support yesterday ( first time to use it) for 4 hours. I had some serious issues with Zonealarm uninstall and there were .dlls everywhere, and I could only stay online about 5 minutes at a time without a re-boot.

The nice young man in India was wonderful. All is working perfectly now.

AND this was after a tech came to my home for two hours and couldn't fix it, and then when I called two other places both said.....wipe out your OS and start over. No thanks!

So, I'm re-thinking things. Americans = 3 strick outs, Indian fellow = homerun.

[wtmusic]

13. You're absolutely right...sort of

I've talked to other people who've had similar experiences to yours. The question is:

Should you have to spend 4 hours of your time on an inferior operating system? For Microsoft it is much cheaper to hire the Indian guy at $4/hr than to make good product.

Get a Mac and you can throw your '.dlls' and your problems away. No kidding.

[dfong63]

7. my inbox is being flooded with virus-spam

... thanks to the numerous and well-known weaknesses in microsoft's OS's, every windows user is a tempting target for hackers. if we're lucky, the attacks don't succeed. but we still have to put up with the loss of bandwidth. who needs another reason to hate microsoft?

[Liberal Veteran]

10. That's not entirely Microsoft's fault.....

The inbox being flooded due to the sobig virus is because after all these years, people still don't follow the basics lessons of email security (namely opening up unsolicited attachment).

I am not a big fan of Microsoft's either, but the fact is that even Microsoft cannot protect users from their own stupidity. Unlike the blaster virus which actually DID exploit an open hole in the OS (that had a security patch a month earlier that many failed to patch), the majority of email viruses are the direct result of people who just never learn the lessons of the last 5 zillion viruses they recieved. I can't tell you the number of times I had to remove the happy99 virus from machines (and still do even though the virus has been around for 4 years now) from people who will open any attachment they get without a second thought.

It's a no win situation with these email viruses for Microsoft. Every attempt they make to help protect the customer from email viruses (such as alerts to let you know something is trying to send email automatically which is a common trick of these viruses, blocking known insecure file attachments with extensions that commonly contain a virus, or preventing a customer from running an attachment without saving it to disk first) is met with a flood of calls from customers complaining and wanting to disable the feature because it annoys them. These are the same people that end up being the ones that open the "neat screensaver" attachment that contains a virus and end up flooding your inbox with virus spam because they have you in their address book.

[wtmusic]

14. Microsoft has had security problems from the beginning

and I'm not buying the argument "Well it's the most common operating system..."

From their server software to Windows MS has always had security holes you could drive a truck through. It results from their ignoring security community recommendations and doggedly sticking to their credo of "We're Microsoft, so our way must be better."

[Liberal Veteran]

8. One thing to be perfectly clear on Qwest DSL.....

I am with Qwest and NOT an MSN customer. I specifically called Qwest and told them it would be a cold day in hell before I went to MSN as my ISP regardless of who was providing the wire for my internet. This was when they made the announcement they were switching all Qwest personal users to MSN. To make a long story short, I ended up with Qwest.Net as my ISP and Qwest as DSL provider and have been very happy. If they ever try a forced migration to MSN, I will be back on the phone switching to a local ISP.

MSN sucks. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. As someone who provides support for Microsoft (for at least 4 more weeks anyway, after 5 1/2 years of working for them), I have found myself having to interface with MSN support constantly and I find their product shabby and their support crappy and substandard.

My advice: Stay away from MSN or AOL. For different reasons they both suck. MSN sucks because they provide a crappy product for a premium price and shit for service. AOL provides a halfway decent product that tries to take over your system and extremely proprietary which makes it difficult for the people who don't want use AOL's software as the gatekeeper for EVERYTHING. Personally, I make it a point to find out if I have to use anything proprietary to log on and use the basic functions of the net (email, web surfing, usenet, etc) and if so, I choose a different provider. This is particularly a good idea when you are a non-windows user (I use both windows and linux, so I want my options wide open). Too many big companies are worthless with regards to non-windows platforms.

[Abaques]

11. You have other options....

Call up visi.com and you can get your dsl service through them. They are local to Minneapolis and provide good service. The line will be through Qwest, but you won't have to deal with MSN.


www.visi.com

[Lydia Leftcoast]

12. The guy at the Mac store

recommended Visi as well. I like patronizing local businesses, so I'll give them a call tomorrow. (I'm too swamped with work today to deal with anything technical. Spending so much time on e-mail issues yesterday--and e-mail is the lifeblood of my business--got me behind on doing actual work.) :-(