I recently had an experience that epitomizes everything that’s wrong with Microsoft and why it is rapidly being tossed into the Recycling Bin of history.
I have a Vista laptop, and as I’ve recently learned, I am powerless over it. (Just saying that makes me feel like I should belong to a 12-step group. But I digress.) A few months back Vista went completely into the toilet and I had to restore it, using my Gateway notebook’s Recovery with Automatic Data Backup option.
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That actually worked. Vista ran again, though fitfully. And the reason it was so fitful is because that data backup soaked up nearly half of my notebook’s 80GB hard drive. Essentially I now had two complete copies of everything, giving me precious little left over for data or Vista’s insatiable appetite for cached memory.
After a few weeks I couldn’t take the sluglike pace of my laptop anymore and decided to delete the backup, which consisted mostly of programs I didn’t use anymore and a complete copy of Windows Vista.
Deleting my unused programs was easy. Deleting Vista, or any part that came with it like Internet Explorer or Windows Calendar or Windows Defender, was impossible.
My machine would cycle through 20GB worth of files in my backup Windows folder, and then after 15 minutes would conclude “You do not have permission to perform this action.” Would I like to retry? Sure. Only the same thing happened -- time after time.
I had administrative rights over this laptop. I am its only user. But that wasn’t good enough for Microsoft. I still could not be trusted to not do something totally stupid, even though I knew it wasn’t totally stupid and I’d paid for the laptop.
Surely, I thought, this is some kind of bug -- but no. A search on the “you do not have permission” phrase turned up entries on various (and mostly useless) Microsoft support forums proving this was a feature. Microsoft did this on purpose.
