Monday 27 September 2010

Microsoft rant

This is a rant while I wait for Office 2010 to roll back the installation it had nearly completed until it found a folder it couldn't access and therefore couldn't continue and the folder is protected so you can't delete it so you have to abandon the installation. It then can't find files it needs to un-install and comes up with "Error 1712 - we screwed up, no sorry, just piss off, we can't be bothered to write a sodding error trap and fix to get you through this."

Hey, Bill, the point is this: I just made a clean install of Office 2007 on a new drive - two weeks ago. I'm now upgrading to Office 2010 (don't ask, it's a long story). And IT WON'T DO IT!!

I mean how much do you have to pay a Microsoft employee, for a product that retails at about $600, to writing the effing code, to make sure that you can always install the bloody thing. It makes me see red. I could write the code to do that, and I'm an amateur. What is going on??

I have struggled with PCs and Microsoft since they started. I fix people's computers, I'm a bit of a geek. Here I am in 2010 and Microsoft can't even write an installation program that anticipates and solves problems. Give me strength.

OH. OH. Now get this. I go to Add/Remove programs to remove Office 2007 and it tells me "The language of this installation package is not supported by your system." It's ENGLISH you American tossers, what the hell do you think it is!!

Ok so now I'm running the FixIT file that uninstalls Office 2007. IN DOS!!! So why ON EARTH isn't the online FixIT file IN THE INSTALLATION PROGRAM???? Why do I have to go and search for it? You know, you get to think of this rubbish as normal, but I bought a Mac last year and oh boy. The loveliest thing in the world in Finder - you can find any file, instantly, anywhere. Bliss. And the rest. Years of my life have been wasted staring at progress bars.

DOS. Der. I should have deleted the folder in Dos. Kuh.

3 comments:

Ralph Corderoy said...

Mac OS X may be nice and shiny, but as someone who used to program their Psion, wouldn't you prefer a Linux like Ubuntu on your PCs? Then you get access to the source of everything when you want to know more.

Anonymous said...

+1 for Linux! Free to try and easy thanks to Live CDs. Not as pretty as Mac OS X (although can be made very pretty with some effort) but much more interesting.

Tim Bentinck said...

Thanks guys, but I'm determined to manage to create a four way sync from my Psion Revo to my iPhone. Goes like this: Revo to Outlook 2010, Outlook to Google Calendar, Google Calendar to iPhone Informant. The plan is, I put the Revo in the dock, and within about five minutes the diary updates are in the iPhone. A meeting of centuries!
Still can't bloody install Office though!!