Gordaen’s Blog

Every operating system has good parts and bad parts. One of the claims I hear frequently is how unfriendly Linux is, particularly the error messages. I do not necessarily disagree—in many cases the error messages are cryptic—I just think that Windows has the same problem. Unfortunately, people just get used to Windows and with the hundreds of millions of users, you can type practically any error message into Google and see plenty of results. For many people, I think OSX is a far better choice.

Back to the point: the user experience on an operating system (particularly one that is marketed to the masses) needs to be as painless as possible. Inevitably, problems will arise. The difference between a good experience and a bad experience when it comes to errors is marked by two things: frequency and ease of fixing. In other words, how often are these errors coming up and how hard is it to fix the problem that is causing the errors? Errors can be amusing and they can be potentially deadly.

This screenshot shows an error in ipconfig. For those who don’t know, you can run ipconfig from the command line and it will spit out some real basic info about your network connections. It’s nice for quickly determining the IP address of a computer. One particular time when I ran ipconfig, it showed the error in the screenshot. A device is malfunctioning, but it doesn’t say what device or what problem it is having. There isn’t even an error code. It just says, “Call Microsoft; Something is broke and we don’t know what or why.”

When Microsoft does release updates, the end user does not see much info about them. I don’t think that the end user should need to see details, but the option should be there. The 10 Microsoft updates a day shouldn’t all say:

A security issue has been identified that could allow an attacker to compromise your Windows-based system and gain control over it. You can help protect your computer by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

If you don’t even know whether it requires a restart, should I really feel safe installing this update? As seen in the second screenshot, Windows is not even clear if a restart will update the computer. It only says that turning off the computer will let the update work, but shouldn’t rebooting work? None of the updates say that you have to turn your computer off to install them (though you should just leave it off if you want the computer to actually be secure).

Ultimately, any operating system will run into problems, but when the only answer to a problem is “call Microsoft,” it’s time to make some changes.