I know the crew that argues constantly over using Windows or *nix, I try not to get involved in this because I know each has it’s place and can work well when used properly. No matter how hard I try I keep finding myself crippled thanks to Windows and it’s “user friendliness”.

I was doing some work and accidentally pulled the network cable from my machine. No biggie you say, plug it back in, wait for DHCP to renew and good to go, oh if only that was it. Upon boot my machine now refuses to start any networking services that I depend upon.

According to Google, the errors I’m getting only appear on Vista (I’m on XP) so thats helpful to know. When referring to Microsoft’s knowledgebase, the problem I’m having was fixed when XP Service Pack 2 was released. Oh really? That’s funny because I’ve been on Service Pack 2 for about 2 years, and this is a new problem today.

So seeing as no-one has recorded having this problem on XP Service Pack 2, I tried to go through the messages in the Event Viewer. Brilliant idea, now the only thing I can work out is that it all stems from a broken or invalid pipe. Oh they also refer me to the Microsoft site, yep the one that says this isn’t possible under my version of XP.

Makes you sick, well at least it makes me sick. If i have a problem on any of my four Gentoo Linux boxes, I can read the appropriate log file, google as necessary, and fix the problem. No such luxury on windows, the error messages are unhelpful, vague and totally useless unless maybe you took an 18 year course on “Managing Windows when it throws a wobbly”.

Does anyone else out there believe that Microsoft might have gone overboard in trying to make their software user friendly? Instead of *nix, where anyone can learn to use all aspects of it given time, Microsoft seem to prefer letting anyone do some things, with no training…but you’ll suffer when you actually need to fix a problem.

Having worked in a computer shop for several years, I know all too well when you get in a computer to fix, there’s only a chance that an engineer will be able to diagnose, let alone fix it. A wipe and reload is so commonplace that I still wake up screaming those words.

Imagine having to wipe and reload your linux box. What could you possibly need to do that for unless you “rm -rf /” the system, even then you can recover it with work. I’m just sick and tired of reloading my single windows desktop machine at least every few months, when my old linux boxes are good for years.

Funnily enough, it’s only the microsoft services that don’t start, I can still browse the net, use my email, write this post. What I can’t do is interface with my windows server, or my samba server in any way shape or form. Could this be a problem with the infamous windows protocols, I’m unsure of the name, but the one that causes your machine to freeze when you try to browse a machine that’s not currently online. I mean what kind of idiocy makes all this stuff happen?

I only use windows on my desktop so that I can still play some games, and use some graphics/3d applications that haven’t yet been superseded by open source offerings. The day that I can finally dump windows and live in peace, where are you?

One last thing, this post is regarding windows XP, which I’ve used for years, relishing in the stability that win2k showed us. Please don’t even get me started on Vista, I’ve had to do remote phone support with it and frankly I’d rather shoot myself in the lung. I can only assume that Vista leads us further off into the wilderness, where no-one has a clue what their computer is up to.

Sorry if this post was rant-ish, but I’ve just sat up til 2am trying to get this fixed, shame its all wasted when I reinstall tomorrow.