Where were Microsoft's Quality Assurance Team?

Where were QA when they allowed Vista to exist? Why am I stroppy about this?
Dead simple. I run Vista Business workstation on a 2003 domain. I have IE7 installed.
Today I want to access a site to check for client that their site is accessible remotely. Following what the supplier told us to do yesterday to allow Active X controls to install I got nowhere. Whatever I tried, whatever settings in IE I used, I could not get the Active X to install despite being offered the UAC control to specify the administrator and password credentials. This surely should be enough.
However I thought maybe I should log on as the administrator. So I logged off. 20 minutes later I am still waiting for the machine to offer me the log on screen. This includes having done a cold restart. 30 minutes later and after my second cold restart I have got my system back.
Surely logging off as one user and logging on as another is not difficult. Surely it should not require a reboot of the system? Surely we deserve better from the world's leading software developer.
Let hope QA have been awake during the long overdue release of Win7.

Microsoft piracy campaign scalps 12 more resellers

We have always been committed to making sure that we issue properly licenced software even if that means that we seem more expensive than other suppliers. That is not to say that we believe that software is fairly priced.
Software such as MS Office that can ship into almost every business always seems to pricey, sometimes costing almost as much as the machine it runs on.
That being said we want to be in business this year, next year and the year after that so we don't mess with shipping unlicensed software.

We came across this article by Alex Scroxton today, 28th April 2009. I think it explains why we take the attitude we do.

QUOTE
Microsoft’s voracious anti-piracy campaign has netted 12 more traders caught selling illegal software, with the bulk of the incidents in the North-West of England and Berkshire.

The resellers involved were all found to have been either selling software illegally or hard-disk loading.

Microsoft UK general manager of SMEs and partners, Scott Dodds, said that attitudes to piracy needed to change during the downturn.
“Historically, many in the channel have seen piracy as a relatively low priority, [but] at a time when the FSB claims 120 businesses a day are going bust, unfair competition puts pressure on resellers’ margins and threatens to drive them out of business,” he said.

Microsoft anti-piracy attorney Graham Arthur reiterated the vendor’s commitment to maintaining a level playing field, adding: “We will be more successful with a channel that’s 100% committed to do the same. If partners see suspicious buying patterns or too good to be true prices they should tell us.”
UNQUOTE

With the quality of open source GNU products offering alternatives to Microsoft there is never any reason to ship illegal software.

Microsoft user survey

Microsoft made a mistake the other day. They conducted a user survey online and sent one to me!!
There were several things they asked about and I responded as I felt fit but in the free form box at the end I decided to put in some of my pet gripes. Such as:-
Has anyone used a network diagnostic that returned anything other than 'Contact your network administrator'?
Has anyone ever used the update driver option in device manager when a driver is obviously having problems and received anything other that 'Windows could not find a more up to date version'?
Has anyone when installing new hardware used the 'look on the internet for latest software' and had Windows find anything?
I am sure there are other examples but they escape me at present.
If you wish to respond to this blog then please email me on stephen@hillierconsultants.com.

Microsoft networking seems to get worse

Is it just me or has Microsoft networking got worse over recent weeks.
On my home machine which never gets switched off, I used to be able to use networking functions at any time. In the last couple of months, Outlook refuses to collect mail unless I a) log of and log back on or b) hit the repair function on the network connection.
In the last couple of weeks at home and at work I have had timeouts on displaying web pages which then correctly display when I hit the refresh button.
To explain why I am writing this blog today I will offer an example. At work I have two computers on my desk, one running Vista Business, one running Ubuntu Hardy.
I was trying to access some pages on the Dell website (I won't bore you with why I would do such a foolhardy thing). My Vista machine was up and running. Go to IE (7) and type in www.dell.com. Wait for the first page to display, link to the next page and ...... Nothing. Windows connection display flashing back and forth.
After waiting for a while I decide to take action.
I boot up my Linux machine. I log on. I load Firefox. I type www.dell.com in the address bar. I get the first page displayed. I link to the next page and lo.... It displays BEFORE the Vista machine does. Albeit by only a few seconds but look at what it has done to get there.
Let's just consider the following.
Two machines of similar hardware spec. Both log on the the same domain server. Both use that domain server as the primary DNS server. Both access the internet through the same broadband link. Both accessed the same website pages. What is different. The operating system.
I have not in the past been one of those who knocks Microsoft, my posts on the Ubuntu forum bears witness to that, but why, oh why, with all the resources Microsoft can throw at a problem does the system perform slower and slower. None of the upgrades seem to improve performance. It seems that where we once thought we were wading in the thin sugary syrup, we now seem to be struggling through thick black treacle.
Come on Microsoft get it fixed.

Ping error 1231 in Vista

Have you had an error 1231 when using ping on Vista. We had our second case of this on a laptop today.
The laptop was brought in because it could not connect to the internet. We did all the usual things, turning off firewalls, checking connection settings, we changed between dynamic IP address allocation and fixed IP addresses.
On our network we have a mixture of fixed and dynamic addresses all of which work OK. We use our domain server as the first DNS server in the chain. We have done everything right. Yet, no internet connection.
If we used fixed addresses we could see other systems on our network and ping them but not those outside. With dynamic addresses we got the error 1231 if we tried to ping anything including local addresses.
We spent almost 3 hours today searching a number of support fora (even the Microsoft tech help forum) and have put in place a number of suggested changes. One suggested change which we could not put in play was to change the graphics adapter card so we had to keep the Nvidia card that comes with the machine.
None of the suggested changes made any difference. It became obvious from the posts in forum after forum that there is no single way of removing this error and I even doubt if any one has really found a fix for this.
In the end we had to advise our customer that we needed to do a 'back to factory settings' restore of the machine as the most expedient way to deal with this problem.
My issue is this. Why is it that an organisation such as Microsoft with all the resources it has to offer is unable to come up with a fix for this and get rid of it? Similar problems have existed in every release since Windows 2000 so it has been around for quite a while and should have been fixed by now.
If anyone has this problem Google "ping 1231 vista" and look at any of the sites that are listed.