5 ms·

Windows help and Windows troubeshooter are among the two most useless things in the OS (and lately it's Cortana). It far easier and more relevant to just do a G

Windows help and Windows troubeshooter are among the two most useless things in the OS (and lately it's Cortana). It far easier and more relevant to just do a Google search than waste time with these things. Same goes for answers.microsoft.com, whenever i see that link on top og Google results I'm pretty sure I'll just waste 10 minutes of my life and then search for the same thing on Stackexchange and pray to god someone has answered there in the succinct SO way. God knows how much resources and man hours Microsoft puts into making these things.

pjmlp 9y ago
Those features are not made for us, rather for the majority of clueless users that save files in whatever directory happens to be the default one.
- Macha 9y ago
  Do they know what F1 is?
  - aluhut 9y ago
    They will when they find out what F2 does.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Many keyboards have "Help" written on it.
- virtualized 9y ago
  That's the type of user who would never read the help content even if it was good.
froindt 9y ago
I remember back in the days of 98 when in my experience, hitting F1 would trigger the help which would never load rapidly or successfully. My standard operating procedure was to do a hard shutdown. It was so frustrating. I was roughly 5-7 while using it. Maybe it wasn't that bad and I was simply impatient. Regardless, it's always been useless to me.
- pavement 9y ago
  And for this very reason (throttled CPU lock over accidental bullshit > BSOD > necessitating cutting all electrical power to all circuits) was THE reason I despised the idea of proprietary hard-soldered batteries in laptops and mobile devices, and shaped my buying habits for years. I simply could not trust these shit options, regarding unhackable-useless-cruft-removal-customizations (aka: pre-live-cd-linux era) not conflicting with the need to cut power to the main board and CPU, to force a cold boot on a moment's notice. Now, I still despise the idea of non-removable battery power, and avoid it vehemently, but for different reasons. Basically fuck any Android device that has no removable battery, no well-understood rooting procedures, and locked falsh firmware. Fuck Android's slow-loading, identity-authentication-prompting-geographic-location-demanding shitware, and all-encompassing, non-uninstallable-OEM-but-still-mostly-Google/Facebook/Twitter-garbage. Fuck Apple products that refuse to power on even when plugged into power, and fully capable of displaying a fancy, animated empty battery graphic. Fuck that shit right in the god damned face. I plug you into the wall, and you shall power on at my whim. I want you off, I pop the battery and pull the plug whenever I want, or I THROW IT ON THE GROUND.
sp332 9y ago
Office has a zillion features buried in various menus and panels. The help feature has been pretty reliable when I need to find something that I know is in there.
- katastic 9y ago
  Surely you're kidding right? I have never once found an answer in an F1 help in a Microsoft product. And I've been using Windows since 3.0. On a somewhat related note: Before wiki's, google, and stackoverflow became the norm, I used to love downloading CHM (compiled help files) references for HTML 3.x, Javascript, C/C++, and more.
  - kw71 9y ago
    I use Excel rather infrequently but when I do it's for something complicated, I could not do anything in Excel without F1 help. Just Excel.
  - Splines 9y ago
    Way back in the day, the help documentation shipped with MSDOS really helped me out. IIRC it had a colored text-graphical interface that let you look at all the commands and what they could do. Really helped out a young kid figure out how to write autoexec.bat/config.sys files so that his games could run. Being able to write menus so I could customize my setup for each game was so amazing. With the advent of the internet the quality of on-system help documentation has stagnated.
    - m_mueller 9y ago
      'stagnates'. ha. what an euphemism.
  - mattmanser 9y ago
    My recollection is that help on visual studio and the old SQL server tool used to be excellent until they moved it online. Then it became uselessly slow.
13of40 9y ago
Don't know if you noticed, but a few years ago a ton on the on-box help content in Windows got replaced with fwlinks. I'm pretty sure it was because they realized they were spending a ton of money on shipping and localizing content that people would just ignore in favor of search results. Open notepad and look at Help->View Help for an example.
- jandrese 9y ago
  On a side note, this is extremely uncool for people working on non-internet connected machines. It is doubly annoying when you're using the web interface to interact with a device and click help and it 503s because they didn't bother to ship the manual on the device. Every year it becomes harder and hard to work on machines that aren't 24/7 connected to the internet. My favorite is when people say "oh, there is this webservice we need you to deploy" and I look and it is written in node.js and has about a billion dependencies, each one of which will require its own waiver and approval.
IshKebab 9y ago
I remember Visual C++ 6 where F1 would instantly go to and offline reference to the current symbol, similar to Qt Creator now. It was great. Of course now it searches done Windows live forum or something and is 100% useless.
- gmueckl 9y ago
  AFAIK pressing F1 in Visual Studio takes you to the top Bing result for the text under the cursor within MSDN. This could be the reference you were looking for, a reference for something completely different in a different programming language (a lot of potentially helpful context is not considered) or in extreme cases some other random article or discussion. It's all over the place.
- CarVac 9y ago
  I can't believe that I've used Qt Creator for three years and never knew that.
  - IshKebab 9y ago
    You can also add cppreference in as a help module: http://en.cppreference.com/w/Cppreference:Archives#Qt_help_book http://en.cppreference.com/w/Cppreference:Archives#Qt_help_b...
- revelation 9y ago
  I haven't dared pressing F1 for a long time now but I remember Visual Studio versions where pressing F1 would completely stop your computer because it starts up the "Help Server", lots of 7200 spinning rust churn, more churn, an Electron-style app opens..
  - int_19h 9y ago
    That would be VS 2010 and later. Before that, it had an actual working offline help system (which took, IIRC, more than half of those CDs that came in the box). And that help was actually pretty good.
- 9y ago
c3534l 9y ago
I've never been helped by nor successfully troubleshot anything with either of those. And I'm baffled why a glorified text document which rarely contains any useful information grinds my beefy gaming computer to a halt.
int_19h 9y ago
> It far easier and more relevant to just do a Google search than waste time with these things. Keep in mind that the Windows help system (and F1 as a shortcut for the same) dates back to when Internet was not a given - heck, TCP was not a given. Now that I think about it, I actually wonder when F1=help became a thing. I distinctly recall a lot of DOS software already using it - e.g. Norton Commander had help on F1 since v1.0, and that shipped in 1986.
- tinus_hn 9y ago
  The internet has been a thing for quite some time now, like at least 4 os releases? Microsoft could have found the time to redo the help system to suck less.
  - int_19h 9y ago
    It has been redone (whether it sucks less is subjective, of course).
technion 9y ago
I really don't understand how a company as big as Microsoft allows something like answers.microsoft.com to exist. Despite for some reason having very good SEO, searches that land you there nearly always involve the same pattern. An MVP restates the question. Then they suggest running an irrelevant command, such as "sfc /scannow". Then when it doesn't help they suggest taking the issue somewhere else. It's not hyperbolic to suggest you could replace hundreds of MVPs with a bot and noone would notice. The lack of moderation means common searches land you on threads - on a Microsoft subdomain - full of nothing but bagging out Microsoft and swearing at the state of things. I mean I get that for a resources constrained company it can be hard to do better, and I wouldn't fault small businesses. But given this shows up for just about every Google search relating to Microsoft, you'd think there'd be marketing value in fixing it.

pjmlp 9y ago

Those features are not made for us, rather for the majority of clueless users that save files in whatever directory happens to be the default one.

Macha 9y ago
Do they know what F1 is?
- aluhut 9y ago
  They will when they find out what F2 does.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Many keyboards have "Help" written on it.
virtualized 9y ago
That's the type of user who would never read the help content even if it was good.

froindt 9y ago

I remember back in the days of 98 when in my experience, hitting F1 would trigger the help which would never load rapidly or successfully. My standard operating procedure was to do a hard shutdown. It was so frustrating. I was roughly 5-7 while using it. Maybe it wasn't that bad and I was simply impatient. Regardless, it's always been useless to me.

pavement 9y ago
And for this very reason (throttled CPU lock over accidental bullshit > BSOD > necessitating cutting all electrical power to all circuits) was THE reason I despised the idea of proprietary hard-soldered batteries in laptops and mobile devices, and shaped my buying habits for years. I simply could not trust these shit options, regarding unhackable-useless-cruft-removal-customizations (aka: pre-live-cd-linux era) not conflicting with the need to cut power to the main board and CPU, to force a cold boot on a moment's notice. Now, I still despise the idea of non-removable battery power, and avoid it vehemently, but for different reasons. Basically fuck any Android device that has no removable battery, no well-understood rooting procedures, and locked falsh firmware. Fuck Android's slow-loading, identity-authentication-prompting-geographic-location-demanding shitware, and all-encompassing, non-uninstallable-OEM-but-still-mostly-Google/Facebook/Twitter-garbage. Fuck Apple products that refuse to power on even when plugged into power, and fully capable of displaying a fancy, animated empty battery graphic. Fuck that shit right in the god damned face. I plug you into the wall, and you shall power on at my whim. I want you off, I pop the battery and pull the plug whenever I want, or I THROW IT ON THE GROUND.

sp332 9y ago

Office has a zillion features buried in various menus and panels. The help feature has been pretty reliable when I need to find something that I know is in there.

katastic 9y ago
Surely you're kidding right? I have never once found an answer in an F1 help in a Microsoft product. And I've been using Windows since 3.0. On a somewhat related note: Before wiki's, google, and stackoverflow became the norm, I used to love downloading CHM (compiled help files) references for HTML 3.x, Javascript, C/C++, and more.
- kw71 9y ago
  I use Excel rather infrequently but when I do it's for something complicated, I could not do anything in Excel without F1 help. Just Excel.
- Splines 9y ago
  Way back in the day, the help documentation shipped with MSDOS really helped me out. IIRC it had a colored text-graphical interface that let you look at all the commands and what they could do. Really helped out a young kid figure out how to write autoexec.bat/config.sys files so that his games could run. Being able to write menus so I could customize my setup for each game was so amazing. With the advent of the internet the quality of on-system help documentation has stagnated.
  - m_mueller 9y ago
    'stagnates'. ha. what an euphemism.
- mattmanser 9y ago
  My recollection is that help on visual studio and the old SQL server tool used to be excellent until they moved it online. Then it became uselessly slow.

13of40 9y ago

Don't know if you noticed, but a few years ago a ton on the on-box help content in Windows got replaced with fwlinks. I'm pretty sure it was because they realized they were spending a ton of money on shipping and localizing content that people would just ignore in favor of search results. Open notepad and look at Help->View Help for an example.

jandrese 9y ago
On a side note, this is extremely uncool for people working on non-internet connected machines. It is doubly annoying when you're using the web interface to interact with a device and click help and it 503s because they didn't bother to ship the manual on the device. Every year it becomes harder and hard to work on machines that aren't 24/7 connected to the internet. My favorite is when people say "oh, there is this webservice we need you to deploy" and I look and it is written in node.js and has about a billion dependencies, each one of which will require its own waiver and approval.

IshKebab 9y ago

I remember Visual C++ 6 where F1 would instantly go to and offline reference to the current symbol, similar to Qt Creator now. It was great. Of course now it searches done Windows live forum or something and is 100% useless.

gmueckl 9y ago
AFAIK pressing F1 in Visual Studio takes you to the top Bing result for the text under the cursor within MSDN. This could be the reference you were looking for, a reference for something completely different in a different programming language (a lot of potentially helpful context is not considered) or in extreme cases some other random article or discussion. It's all over the place.
CarVac 9y ago
I can't believe that I've used Qt Creator for three years and never knew that.
- IshKebab 9y ago
  You can also add cppreference in as a help module: http://en.cppreference.com/w/Cppreference:Archives#Qt_help_book http://en.cppreference.com/w/Cppreference:Archives#Qt_help_b...
revelation 9y ago
I haven't dared pressing F1 for a long time now but I remember Visual Studio versions where pressing F1 would completely stop your computer because it starts up the "Help Server", lots of 7200 spinning rust churn, more churn, an Electron-style app opens..
- int_19h 9y ago
  That would be VS 2010 and later. Before that, it had an actual working offline help system (which took, IIRC, more than half of those CDs that came in the box). And that help was actually pretty good.
9y ago

c3534l 9y ago

I've never been helped by nor successfully troubleshot anything with either of those. And I'm baffled why a glorified text document which rarely contains any useful information grinds my beefy gaming computer to a halt.

int_19h 9y ago

> It far easier and more relevant to just do a Google search than waste time with these things. Keep in mind that the Windows help system (and F1 as a shortcut for the same) dates back to when Internet was not a given - heck, TCP was not a given. Now that I think about it, I actually wonder when F1=help became a thing. I distinctly recall a lot of DOS software already using it - e.g. Norton Commander had help on F1 since v1.0, and that shipped in 1986.

tinus_hn 9y ago
The internet has been a thing for quite some time now, like at least 4 os releases? Microsoft could have found the time to redo the help system to suck less.
- int_19h 9y ago
  It has been redone (whether it sucks less is subjective, of course).

technion 9y ago

I really don't understand how a company as big as Microsoft allows something like answers.microsoft.com to exist. Despite for some reason having very good SEO, searches that land you there nearly always involve the same pattern. An MVP restates the question. Then they suggest running an irrelevant command, such as "sfc /scannow". Then when it doesn't help they suggest taking the issue somewhere else. It's not hyperbolic to suggest you could replace hundreds of MVPs with a bot and noone would notice. The lack of moderation means common searches land you on threads - on a Microsoft subdomain - full of nothing but bagging out Microsoft and swearing at the state of things. I mean I get that for a resources constrained company it can be hard to do better, and I wouldn't fault small businesses. But given this shows up for just about every Google search relating to Microsoft, you'd think there'd be marketing value in fixing it.