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Whenever I google a problem with a microsoft product, and the search ends up on one of these answer.microsoft.com pages, I always click on the link with an enor
by adsfqwop 10y ago
Whenever I google a problem with a microsoft product, and the search ends up on one of these answer.microsoft.com pages, I always click on the link with an enormous feeling of dread.
I don't think I've ever seen a usable answer on that site.
- ionwake 10y agoI completely agree. Most of the time I get the impression the person writing it is a employee who is reading someone else's notes, has no idea what the answer even is, and then does the best to cover it up by using abstractions, off topic insight and buzz words. Sorry Microsoft just my opinion regarding this one area. Room to improve maybe ?
- easytiger 10y agoAs a linux user since the 90s, googling for basic issues on Windows is an unmitigated disaster. For linux I have always got a correct answer.
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y agoI don't know about that - with (especially desktop) Linux one has to be quite specific to get an up to date solution. There's been a lot of churn in the stack in last decade (i think the stack is much improved as a result).
- dnautics 10y agoyeah sometimes I have to check the date on the solution to make sure I really want to do that
- mod 10y agoYes. Ubuntu, you'd better be including a version. Arch? You need to make sure you're not looking at something a decade old. I often just scope my google search. Also, I do not find that I can answer every question easily for linux, even though I've used it as my primary OS since ~2002 and have some idea what to google for. In fact, I have both sound and bluetooth issues on my machine right now that I have given up trying to resolve.
- endisukaj 10y agoI've been using Linux for the past 6 years (on and off only the first two of those) and I have never had this happen to me. Maybe when I was using Ubuntu it was harder to find good answers that were not specific to someone else's usecase because of the nature of Ubuntu forums.
- sdenton4 10y agoBack in the day I chose Gentoo Linux entirely based on an evaluation of its forums. It didn't disappoint: In five or so years of heavy use, I only ran into one issue that wasn't explained in great detail in the forums. The ridiculously high bar to entry seemed to do wonders for discussion quality.
- endisukaj 10y agoI agree. I had the same experience as you when I moved from Ubuntu to Arch, the forums and Wiki are of extremely high quality.
- joatmon-snoo 10y agoI was born in the '90s... but with Linux, the case for me is that given enough time, I can usually find all the information I need to figure it out. With Windows it's Google for 10 minutes then throw my hands in the air and figure out a workaround. I'm not sure which is better for my productivity: realizing that I accidentally screwed up my DNS resolver and spending the next hour hunting through forum posts and man pages before finding the snippet that explains what I was supposed to do and reconfiguring my resolved.conf symlink or figuring out the quickest, crudest workaround on Windows.
- mirimir 10y agoI was once told by Microsoft support that what I wanted to do was impossible, because the code was so old and chaotic that nobody understood how it worked ;)
- arca_vorago 10y agoAs a sysadmin who has supported the gamut of OS's, the key to windows problem googling is the "-" operator. -microsoft.com -expertsexchange.com ... Stackoverflow really changed the game. I really should get active there again to give back more, I can't tell you how much a random stackover/superuser question helped me narrow down an issue. Also, has everyone forgotten about IRC?
- Endy 10y agoAs a Windows user since the 90ss, when I tried using Linux for a week or two on a spare machine while my primary laptop was in the shop... Trying to find any information on Linux that didn't involve books' worth of text saying 'compile this', 'write this program in C', or 'do this incredibly arcane commandline operation' became an exercise in futility. Whenever I have a specific problem in Windows, I can Google it and either find a relevant YouTube video or something of value in the Microsoft knowledge base (separate from the "answers." Q&A board).
- krylon 10y ago> 'do this incredibly arcane commandline operation' I have seen my fair share of this in the Windows world, too. Edit registry keys you never even heard of, use that (mostly undocumented) command invocation (I'm look at you, SharePoint!), edit that XML file that sits in a place where it does not even make sense... On Linux (and other Unix systems), at least you have man pages, on Windows I cannot recall a single instance where the builtin help system has actually helped me. I mean, even MS-freaking-DOS had a reasonably useful builtin help. With Linux, at least it gets better once you get the hang of it. Microsoft's sorry excuse for documentation is (mostly) a joke. (The exception are developer tools - the documentation on T-SQL and the .Net framework classes is fairly good, even though it's such a mess that it's easier to Google for specific entries than using the TOC or the builtin search... once I find what I was looking for, I do usually find a helpful answer to my question.) (To be fair, when I first started using Linux, I found it incredibly strange, complicated, confusing and intimidating; within the first six months of using Linux, I was this close to literally throwing my PC out the window on no less than three occasions. So I know the frustration you speak of.)
- youareterrible 10y agoPowershell has man too. It's an alias for get-help. Man get-command Get-help get-help
- krylon 10y agoI know, and I like PowerShell's help system. But there are still plenty of commands available that are not PowerShell cmdlets. But I agree, PowerShell is a huge improvement.
- TheRealDunkirk 10y ago<cough>Bullshit</cough> If you were a Linux user in the mid-90's, then about the only place to get "help" was #linux on EFnet. Collectively, I don't think I've suffered more abuse on the internet than in that forum. And, yes, I'm still bitter. It was NOT a noob-friendly place. The best place -- ever -- to get Linux help was, and will always have been, the Gentoo forums, but that didn't take off till the early 2000's.
- mdekkers 10y agoThe best place -- ever -- to get Linux help was, and will always have been, the Gentoo forums True! However, obligatory "Gentoo is rice" link: https://fun.irq.dk/funroll-loops.org/ https://fun.irq.dk/funroll-loops.org/
- nthcolumn 10y agoSven Vermeulen wrote great docs and the community was my first social media. Then that compiz-beryl thing happened and... where is she now I wonder?
- bubblethink 10y agoI wonder how much of Linux's recent success (I know it's still a tiny fraction) is just because of Google. I can't imagine using Linux if you take away the ability to Google. The fact that usually the results are posts by actual people and not some company stooge makes a world of difference.
- jodrellblank 10y agoMost Linux forum answers online are "do this voodoo I copied from someone else and don't understand". It's a lot harder to pull a specific, coherent, considered answer out of the internet, which doesn't involve duct tape and breakable insecure awful things. "How do I run x on startup" will as likely get you "download this Ruby script which calls IFTTT.com triggered by when your network adapter connects, btw install this binary wifi driver blob" as "put this with a plain text password in /etc/whoknowsbutitworks lol" as "on your distro with your shell the startup system is XYZ and the startup scripts run like a then b then /home/user/c so put it in ~/c"
- jlarocco 10y ago> I don't think I've ever seen a usable answer on that site. To be fair, that isn't specific to Microsoft, and a lot of big company's support sites are useless. IME, Apple's Q&A discussion site is equally useless. The answers there are always along the lines of "That's by design, you can't do that." or "Why do you want to turn that off anyway?!?" I've had much better luck on apple.stackexchange.com
- dullroar 10y ago> "Why do you want to turn that off anyway?!?" This. I can remember asking years ago, back when I had to work on OS X, asking how to turn off that freakin' annoying jumping icon in the system tray that leaped up and down after every successful print job until you dismissed it, just like an excited two-year-old telling you they went potty in the potty chair AGAIN, "Just like a big kid!" I can't imagine anyone thinking that attention-grabbing, ADHD-exacerbating, flow-destroying behavior was good by design, but was asked, "Why do you want to turn that off anyway?"
- revelation 10y agoAt least there is an occasional employee commenting. Have you seen the Google support forums? Google promotes normal users to moderators on their support forums if they just post enough, so instead of being brushed off by some underpaid employee you are being ignored and ridiculed by someone not even being paid to!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- krylon 10y ago> I don't think I've ever seen a usable answer on that site. At least not from a Microsoft employee. Sadly, the majority of posts from Microsoft employees I have seen basically repeat the problem description, followed by "Did I understand that correctly?", sometimes people get generic advice like reboot their computer, make sure their system has all available updates installed, etc.
- Psilidae 10y agoI hate that they rarely seem to even read the post. I once had a bad issue with one of my Windows PCs, so I dug through the internet and read all of the support docs I could find. Unfortunately none of them were working. In desperation, I turned to asking on the MS support site. I explained my issue, and explicitly stated "I have already tried XYZ, as per other support pages, and it is not working." Naturally, the first and only response was "Please try doing XYZ".
- 21 10y agoMy 7 year old audio interface (E-MU 0404 USB 2.0 for who cares) started making BSODs after upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1. The latest manufacturer drivers were for Vista. I reported it on answer.microsoft.com. They asked for a crash dump. Complied. Another non-ms person analyzed the crash dump and suggested that it's USB 3.0 related. Disabling that in the BIOS solved the issue. But the MS guys kept on going. A few weeks later, a reply that they managed to get their hands on a similar device (!!, cost about $200), but they couldn't find a driver, so they asked for mine. Pointed them to the online driver location (hidden on manufacturer site). Some time after that they commented that they managed to reproduce the BSOD. A few months later they released a fix (into Windows).
- flyinghamster 10y ago> My 7 year old audio interface (E-MU 0404 USB 2.0 for who cares) started making BSODs after upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1. The latest manufacturer drivers were for Vista. I had one of those, and the Vista drivers were never released as a production version. Driver support for it was THE thing that kept me from upgrading from XP to 7, and also what convinced me to never again buy a Creative product. The matter became moot, and XP took a hike, when it finally crapped out one day. My audio interface is now a Focusrite.
- anonbanker 10y agoCreative products are pretty awesome in Linux.
- bastawhiz 10y agoI have to say, the Microsoft folks involved in anything driver-related have been the most competent, down-to-earth, and underappreciated folks at the company. If you're a Microsoft driver person reading this, props to you my friend.
- wisebit 10y agoI've always found it fascinating that Windows/Microsoft error messages seem to have some kind of UUID (Error #c101a053 is one I found on my search history from 5 years ago), but you _can't look them up by UUID_ on the MS help pages or even online (and sometimes they don't seem to even be unique). I've always wanted to know what they do with these numbers.
- cesarb 10y agoThat looks like a NTSTATUS value. You often see also HRESULT values. They are structured values, some of the bits tell you which subsystem generated the error, other bits tell you the error number within that subsystem.
- slrz 10y agoRight. My gripe with it is that you tend to see them thrown into error messages without the corresponding string representation, thus forcing the user to do the lookup by hand. Seriously, it can't be that hard to call the NT equivalent of strerror(3) when formatting these messages.
- dboreham 10y agoI've used that technique in products I built. Not speaking for MS but in my case the UUID was either written into some server log (to hopefully be used to diagnose the problem if reported), or matched diagnostic statements in our source code (so the problem could be diagnosed in conjunction with the code). Using a unique identifier helps prevent the kind of confusion caused when 3 different developers all decide that "this can't happen" is a good diagnostic message to display to the user. Fwiw the identifier you posted isn't a UUID but the same justification applies.
- wisebit 10y agoRight, I expressed myself poorly. Maybe I meant just an ID? My gripe was just that I expected that to index a knowledgebase of error messages, but the one I mentioned, for instance, isn't even documented.
- joe563323 10y agoThanks for sharing this. Me too.