Just a silly rant at Microsoft

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K8Toledo

1014 posts

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#2669850 8-Mar-2021 09:58

Kookoo:

I don't usually use MS Edge or any other MS software when I can avoid it. I can't avoid Windows, but that's a separate story. So here I am, adding a new user account to my PC. Fire up Edge because nothing else is installed yet, and I want to head to the MS account dashboard. Because I'm lazy, I type in "microsoft" in Bing. This was the page I got:

It took me a minute to realise that unlike Google, Bing marks its ads with just a tiny "Ad" label, and the first real result was actually Microsoft Corp NZ. Awesome, let's click on that. This is what you get:

Just how confused is a company that in its own browser, in its own search engine, in the first search result for its own name, it takes you to a 404 on its own website.

Are you sure that's a legit MS URL? When did Microsoft stop using SSL?

Batman

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#2669872 8-Mar-2021 10:31

KiwiSurfer:

Fails for me as well.

Try it yourself, no bing search or Edge required.

https://www.microsoft.com/nz/

got the error page just now

frankv

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#2670972 10-Mar-2021 11:07

Spent a couple of hours helping my Dad with his Win10 PC. He has poor vision, so wanted the "High Contrast" setting, but wanted black text on white background. A bit of jiggery-pokery for that, with the background wanting to go back to the standard mostly-blue image. Other than that, no problem, as far as the actual text in the window panes goes. But it turns out that if you select "high contrast", your colour choices are limited, to the extent that title bars and some menu entries are white text, on the same background as the pane (i.e. white). The only way to actually see the entries is to hover over them for a red on cyan experience.

And of course the above isn't mentioned in the Help, which is so superficial as to be worthless.

Frigging MS PoS.

alasta

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#2671027 10-Mar-2021 12:31

My father recently bought a Windows based computer and it's a really strange system.

He wanted to set up a user account for my mother to log into to collect her email. He started the process and for some unknown reason it set her up as a "children's account" (I assume this is supposed to limit access to objectionable content), then he created a password for her. Then he tried to log in but it rejected the password that he had just created. We attempted a password recovery and it prompted to enter an email address to send the password reset details to. What the? How is that secure?

In the end we had to get the technician in to do it for us.

freitasm

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#2671030 10-Mar-2021 12:33

As an administrator on that computer your father could change the account type and could also reset the password from his own account.

alasta

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#2671072 10-Mar-2021 14:07

As a novice user I find it's better not to tinker with stuff like that if you don't feel confident. Otherwise you can spend a huge amount of time on it and still fail, then when you eventually give up and call a technician you get a patronising spiel about how you shouldn't have done what you did and you've made things a whole lot worse.

Jogre

182 posts

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#2678945 23-Mar-2021 08:54

ANglEAUT:

freitasm: ... - in this case the URL should really go to the right place).

Even then, how difficult is it to review web server logs for 404 errors & get a process in to fix those? Could be as easy as putting in a redirect or actually contacting the advertiser to resolve the issue at the source? 40+ years as a global corp & they still have so many basic issues with their systems?

You do realise how many billions of those there'd be a day right?

I'm pretty sure that is also the redirect page for any time someone gets one of the tens of thousands of aka.ms shortlinks wrong as well which will push it up the organic results a fair bit. MS NZ wouldn't manage that.

Samsung

Shop now on Samsung phones, tablets, TVs and more (affiliate link).

Rikkitic

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#2679009 23-Mar-2021 09:34

alasta:

As a novice user I find it's better not to tinker with stuff like that if you don't feel confident. Otherwise you can spend a huge amount of time on it and still fail, then when you eventually give up and call a technician you get a patronising spiel about how you shouldn't have done what you did and you've made things a whole lot worse.

Tell the technician you are not paying her to be patronising and if she doesn't work on her people skills she will never be anything but a technician.

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

Lias

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#2679325 23-Mar-2021 15:19

FWIW Edge is pretty good, but I'm in the process of moving back to Firefox after many years because Microsoft is following Google and implementing Manifest V3 in Edge. Idiotic move on their part IMHO, if they'd refused to implement it and gotten some good PR they could have made Google look like the data sucking anti privacy parasites they are and themselves look likes heroes.. But nope, they want to be blood sucking parasites too.

I'm generally fairly pro Microsoft but this was an utter facepalm moment.

I'm a geek, a gamer, a dad, a Quic user, and an IT Professional. I have a full rack home lab, size 15 feet, an epic beard and Asperger's. I'm a bit of a Cypherpunk, who believes information wants to be free and the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. If you use my Quic signup you can also use the code R570394EKGIZ8 for free setup.

yitz

2075 posts

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#2679382 23-Mar-2021 16:20

Perhaps they need to bring back that version of MSN Toolbar they made which scraped search results off Google in order to improve results of their own Bing search engine.

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