Whining about Windows

My soon-to-be-ex husband bought my in-laws a computer a few weeks ago. This is a big deal, you know (apart from the seemingly generous gesture), because it's taken them years, literally years of prevarication to get to this point. The number of times I've sat with Margaret at my computer as we looked up something she wanted to find, and had been saving for weeks to ask me, escapes me. They'd come for Sunday lunch, and we'd end up spending the afternoon on the interweb, looking for things. I'll never forget Eric's first foray onto eBay, where he bought, with some glee, some golf clubs from the US for the usual bargain price. Margaret and I had located an old friend of hers, not through Friends Reunited in the end, but by Googling her name!

I'd tried to set up a computer for them so they could dial up the internets and browse eBay, send emails, read my blog etc. Unfortunately it was a very old machine, and I was trying to use Linux to set up a Modem I'd been assured would work. Since my knowledge of Linux is still very limited, you can imagine how pathetic it was a couple of years ago while I was trying this project.

So, you can see - it's a big deal.

But where, I hear you cry, does the whining come in?

Last week, just after we'd returned from France, and were still shaking the sand out of EVERYTHING, I got a call from my mum-in-law. I thought this was a call for a chat, and settled down to do justice to a good chit-chat, but was surprised to find that the real reason for the call was to ask for help on the computer. So I put on my computer solving hat, and asked for the symptoms. It turned out to be a pretty big problem - Vista wouldn't let them log on. I don't know about you, but being able to log on to my computer is a pretty fundamental part of it all.

The message "The user profile service service failed the logon"(sic) produced a page full of results on the aforementioned Google, showing me quickly that this is a known problem. A Known Problem? Yet, not a Fixed problem, apparently. And, according to the dates of the entries, a well-know-for-at-least-the-last-8-months problem.

What the hell are Microsoft playing at? This is not a user fixable problem, although when the aforementioned soon-to-be-ex husband went down there to help, with his good computer knowledge (c'mon, can you really see me having married a guy with no computer skills? Really?) it was a relatively simple task to get Windows to start up in Safe Mode, and restore the system to a previous point. But why wasn't this easier for Margaret and Eric to find? I tried to talk them through starting up in Safe Mode, but somehow this didn't work and since I couldn't see what was going on, and don't know Vista very well, it all worked to confound me. Fixing problems aside - why on earth is this problem still rearing it's hideously ugly head, a year (oh yes, a whole bloody year) after it was first talked about on the web? This is, as previously mentioned, a pretty fundamental issue.

You can cope, as an end user, with a lot of things going wrong with your computer, if you can login. If an application goes tits-up, well, you can attempt to uninstall and re-install it. As long as you can login. If your internet connection dies, if you can login to the computer, you can attempt to talk to your router, try pinging something external - IF YOU CAN LOGIN!