Damn Microsoft to Hell

What an inflammatory title, I know. But that’s how I feel at what Redmond has created. Both in terms of lack of security and a distinct lack of oversight on the ecosystem that was built around their flagship operating system. Yes, I’m talking about malware and spyware and the anti-versions of these things which are just as bad. But it goes beyond that to core things about the OS that are just completely broken.

I spent a few hours over my neighbors house last night fixing one of the more difficult problems that I’ve ever encountered. Somehow, some way, my neighbor had associated every .exe file extension with Internet Explorer. This meant that launching any program would simply open up the file download dialog and refuse to actually run the program. This was so insidious that even when I selected “run” and not “download” from the dialog, the dialog came  up recursively!

There were a small percentage of administrative/control panel apps that worked. System restore was not one of them. cmd.exe was not one of them In the end I found that I could create a new user. I made them admin, logged in, and I was in a proper environment again. I issued a system restore to a week prior and that fixed the problem.

When I got back to my house it was 1 1:15pm. My son Giovanni waited all day to watch a science show on TV with me, Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. I had promised him the night before and he was very excited. But it was too late to watch the show at that point. We both had to be up early in the AM. He was really sad. And so was I.

Damn Microsoft to Hell.