I hate Microsoft’s products with a real passion these days. Because of my upcoming studies – which of course Boris the Floppy-Haired Labradoodle over in PommieBastardLande has now put in jeopardy through his incredible stupidity – I have started using the cloud-based version of Microsoft Office. I find it… unusable. And before some MSFT fanboi tries to accuse me of being a techno-Luddite, you should know that I’m the kind of person who spent years coding up VBA macros designed to price trades using several different APIs channelled through Excel itself. I know what Excel and Word can do, and I know SQL at a sufficiently high level to be quite comfortable working with both local and online databases.
On top of that, I’ve been using Linux quite happily on my personal PCs for 12 years. I’ve helped my dad and a good friend migrate over to Linux Mint either partially or completely. Whenever the family needs free tech support – well, “free” in the sense that whenever I perform techie duties for my mum, she always shows appreciation by cooking up something nice afterwards (“nicer”, rather, since she’s an excellent cook) – I’m the one who they call. That is quite literally true – way back when I was in college in PommieBastardLande, I got a call from my dad at 3pm my time, about 11pm his time back then, asking for help with his WiFi setup. You can imagine how well that went, given that I’d been away from that house for several months and literally couldn’t even see what was wrong.
The point is, I am far smarter than the average shitlord when it comes to technology. But Microsoft’s idiotic software design policies and increasingly crufty systems and processes can stymie me on occasion, with quite hilarious results.
Today was the perfect case in point.
So there I was earlier today, playing HALO 4 (again) on my Windows partition for about an hour. I finished slaughtering the hell out of the Covies and the Prometheans on the level “Forerunner”, before I shut down my PC to go to the gym. (I tweaked my lower back a bit earlier today doing squats, but it’s not serious – if it were a disc or nerve issue, I wouldn’t be able to move, but I can walk and bend and move pretty easily.)
Then I came back, booted into my Linux partition to write a post on masculinity for my Didactic Agoge, and… wait a minute, where the hell did the WiFi go?!?!?
Note, I’m not talking about WiFi networks not showing up in the system tray. I’m talking about the system not recognising the WiFi adapter AT ALL.
This wasn’t the first time that this had happened. I experienced the same thing about 6 weeks ago, under very similar circumstances. I panicked a bit and thought I might have to reinstall Linux. I rebooted a few times – no dice. Then I tried to boot into a USB live distribution to see if I could use a different device driver – nope, nothing. After that, I tried running a few basic terminal commands like lspci and inxi -v7 to get some idea of whether the system could even find the device.
Turns out, Linux could find the device just fine – it just couldn’t figure out what to do with it.
So there I was, frantically trying to find a solution online, when I came across this page. And right smack at the top was this particular gem:
I have the same problem resolved it by unchecking Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power. It can be found under
Device Manager -> Network Adapters -> your network adapter -> Properties -> Power Management. I guess it’s more of a Windows problem than Ubuntu.
When I saw this, the resultant facepalm very nearly sent the heel of my hand straight through my forehead, such was the force of my shock and frustration.
I booted into WInDOZE and did exactly as was suggested – swearing viciously under my breath all the while. Then I rebooted back into my Linux Mint partition – et VOILA!!!
My Linux Mint partition could now detect and use my WiFi adapter just fine.
Yep. The culprit was definitely WinDOZE.
This is how badly engineered that PoS operating system is. The engineers literally made it possible for the OS to shut down devices BUILT INTO THE SYSTEM without your knowledge or consent, simply in order to save power, even when you are plugged into a steady power source.
Now, I can SORT OF understand this. It makes an odd kind of sense – after all, if a device isn’t being used, why keep it powered on? And while I was playing HALO, of course, there were probably some issues with the network and my PC wasn’t downloading anything, so it made sense to switch the WiFi adapter off.
Unfortunately – and this is where Microsoft’s engineers REALLY show what dumbasses they are – THEY DON’T SWITCH THE DAMNED THING BACK ON after you switch operating systems. And that effectively means that another OS cannot recognise the device itself, because it is then stuck in a “powered-off” state.
I do not think that it is coincidental that Microsoft’s operating system and products have gotten progressively worse, and more crufty, and more annoying, over the last 10 years or thereabouts. During that same time-span, Microsoft has become essentially an Indian company – with a fairly large number of Chinese involved as well.
Now, Satya Nadella has done a good job of moving Microsoft onto the cloud. That saved the company. Google, Amazon, and to some extent Oracle were simply crushing Microsoft’s core businesses and its WInDOZE OS cash-cow was becoming less relevant with every passing month.
Yet, at the same time, the quality of their software, and the usability of the same, has declined precipitously. And this is before we get to the major problems with Microsoft’s Azure platform. I’ve tried it out and I think that, although it has some great ideas, the execution is terrible, particularly with Azure Data Factory and Business Intelligence. Overall, I found Azure to be clunky, slow, and difficult to use – and the UI was based around the AWFUL tile-based system that Windows 8 and 10 use.
As for the rest of Microsoft’s major products – I used to be very skilled with MS Office, as stated above. Indeed, most people would consider me a power user, given how well I knew the Excel keyboard shortcuts and how good I was (and still am) at manipulating and visualising data in the program. But these days, I find Excel 365 to be completely unusable – all of the power user features that I actually need, are not available. Word 365 is even worse – the fonts are GARBAGE and the ribbon thing is completely incomprehensible.
Meanwhile, if I want to do the same things in LibreOffice on Linux Mint, I can do those same exact things much more easily, quickly, and transparently. LibreOffice isn’t perfect – Writer keeps resetting my customised outline preferences to its own default setting every time I restart a numbered or outlined list, and Calc macros are nowhere near as easy to code as VBA ones are. Plus their IDE for Openbasic macros is nowhere near as nice as the VBE.
But if I want to perform statistical analyses, or run scenario analyses in a table, or run a Pivot Table, or create graphs and interface with a database program, or run an R command internally within Calc…
I can do ALL of that cool stuff using software that is completely and totally FREE.
And if I want to hold internet conferences, surf the web using Google Chrome or Brave or Opera or Pale Moon or Firefox – or even Microsoft’s new Chromium-based Edge browser – I can do all of that on Linux.
I can even install Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp Web, Viber, and Telegram on any Ubuntu-based machine and run all of those messaging clients simultaneously.
Bottom line is: the only reason to use MIcrosoft WinDOZE is purely for gaming purposes at this point, unless you do serious CAD work or you have programs that simply will not run in other environments.
And Microsoft has just given me one more reason, among myriad others, to hate and despise their software even more than I do already.
8 Comments
Oh, the pain is real. The pain is real. Microsoft twangs two of my major pet peeves these days.
1.The attitude that you don’t buy the software, they let you use it.
2. Treating you like an imbecile. Updating endlessly, removing functionality that one uses under the guide they could hurt themselves.
I have a perfectly good SAN appliance. It has 2TB of my stuff. Which I can’t get to easily. Windows updated away SMB 1.X. So I re-enabled it. Now, it can’t find the SAN with a name, only an IP, even though the name is fine. All sorts are complaining in forums, not one fix works. They.Don’t.Think.You.Need.It.
Worse yet, browsers have been updated. I can’t get to a device from my browser from my lab web servers. You can’t use a device on a browser without HTTPS, Even though the setting says “ask”. So I have to get a cert for a lab server that sits in it’s own ecosystem.
Self cert, you say? heh…try it in windows. Oh, you’ll get the cert. You just can’t break it to a cert and a key without researching, downloading, and testing.
All that from a few updates. None of it – not one thing – can I not do on my linux box. That cert issue is a few commands on linux, not more than a few on powershell arglebargle on Windows.
It’s all a time sink. An hour or so to discover WTF it’s doing and why. Another hour searching the web to see who else has been screwed by this and trying this or that, followed by another hour on a teams call with my peers all because some nob won’t keep their shit updated and configured properly.
It’s quite funny how the situations have thoroughly reversed. Linux used to be the huge time-sink because doing simple things like hooking up a printer or installing device drivers was difficult and required a lot of annoying technical hacks. These days, though, Linux pretty much “just works” out of the box with some very beautiful and impressive graphics and features. And WinDOZE is just… AWFUL to use.
I call this the update plague, because a lot of Silicon valley companies will do software update for the sake of it while making their users throw fits of rage in front of their screens.
How hard is it to just not fix what is not broken? Is it too much to ask?
Oh and I haven’t forgot about the windows 10 update Microsoft was trying to jam up my throat years ago. I had Windows 8 and it was and works just fine.
I have not tried linux, but I would not be against selling non DRM software with thorough instructions. They have to get some momentum and it can’t be done without profit.
I admit, I have not switched because I don’t use windows for very complex tasks and (perceived?) complexity.
You would be shocked at how far Linux has come, and how easy it is to try. All you need is a USB stick and an internet connection. Hell, you can even try Linux inside of Windows if you know how to setup a virtual machine. The process is very straightforward – just grab a USB stick, burn a disc image onto it, and boot into that stick image. You can then try everything without worries.
And it’s simply not true that great software needs a profit motive behind it. Linux comes with more free software than you can shake a stick at, and if you don’t use your PC for anything more complex than watching videos, listening to music, and surfing the web, then Linux is a complete replacement.
One of my favorite old tech jokes…
Q: What do a computer and an air conditioner have in common?
A: Both stop working when you open windows.
I’ve been through some of this absurdity before.
I like the idea of getting more laptops out of my laptop, and so, there’s VirtualBox.
Installing Windows 7 or anything after it aside from a server version within a VM yields the same annoying dance of mediocre or just plain awful disk performance.
It seems the consumer grade versions of Windows from 7 onward do this absurd dance routine involving processor core parking that effectively gives you even less CPU than you’ve allocated to the virtual machine.
And so I wound up with sub 10MB/sec disk speeds because of processor core dorking on a Getac B360 Pro which is no slouch of a laptop even when it’s idling, at least until I hammered around inside the registry to fix this and a bunch of other stuff that I shouldn’t need to fix.
I especially enjoyed the long call to Microsoft’s activation centre to reactivate my system after changing the virtual disk controller from IDE to SAS.
But the best workaround was to tell Windows 7 that I’m running on an i7-5000 series so I don’t have problems downloading system updates. Microsoft now wants to force people running on older CPUs to “upgrade” to Windows 10. The workaround is relatively straightforward to do once you learn how to set the CPU settings registers within VirtualBox so it simulates the “correct” hardware on VM startup.
Now my Windows 7 VM just pretends to be my old laptop’s hardware and it works.
Really looking forward to Windows 10 Pro in a VM here — I gutted the OEM install of Windows 10 Pro and started out with a recently upgraded version of Linux for the host OS, and so I get to experience this fresh hell again sometime soon.
If it were up to me, some Microsoft people would be in Interrogation Room 3 with some Irish people I know who are good at Benjamin Franklin-like experiments with electricity.
That’s… just… I mean…
Wow. There are no words. I thought Microsoft’s OS was stupid in an OEM state, but I’ve only ever fooled around with it in a VM state for very light stuff, like running Internet Exploder through a VM in order to connect to a company VPN. (I still can’t get over the fact that my last banking job required Exploder to login remotely to my thin-client sessions. No wonder those guys got fined billions of dollars for sheer stupidity.)
But what YOU went through sounds like a visit to the dentist without anaesthesia.
I will say one good thing in favour of Win10: you can download and install it without a product key and it will still run and update and work. (More or less.) No more of that “OEM Key Required” BS.
I make no claims as to whether it works WELL as a VM. I really, REALLY hate Windows, so I try to avoid using it if at all possible. But the day may come wherein I have to install the full-fat version of MS Office 365 (groans) on a WinDOZE VM in order to get things done. So I may have to poke around at it a bit to figure out whether it works or not.
Oh, but we haven’t been to the dentist for sadists yet …
Microsoft disables a lot of commonly used device drivers once you’ve successfully booted Windows 7 on “your hardware”, and so changing the disk controller to SAS from IDE?
You have to know how to do that in the registry, and Microsoft doesn’t provide a UI way to do this.
The magic keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LSI_SAS
and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LSI_SAS2
May as well hit this as well:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LSI_SCSI
Because why not? [shrug]
Now here’s the hilarious part.
There’s a DWORD subkey in there called “Start” that determines whether to load the driver.
You have to set it to 0 for the driver to load.
Yes, 0 is on, not off. Anything other than 0 (such as the default 3) is off.
If you forget to do this, you get to switch your virtual disk controller back to IDE for a while and then tolerate the systems change bollocking you’ll get later.
Inevitably doing this results in a call to the Microsoft activation centre to unscrew your Windows 7 licence plus the licence of every Microsoft product on your system, because using the online activation centre doesn’t work because of a flat refusal to reactivate your already activated installation.
And THAT is where this becomes like dentistry performed like sadists.
My words to the developer: YOU SICK LITTLE MONKEY! 🙂