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Microsoft Quietly Previews PC Advisor Repair Tool

notthatwillsmith writes "On Friday, Microsoft invited members of the Windows Feedback Program to try out a preview of a new application, the Microsoft PC Advisor. The new tool promises to 'continuously monitor your PC for problems and give you the solutions to fix them, in real time.' After testing on several Vista machines with a variety of problems, Maximum PC has written a full report on the Microsoft PC Advisor. The short version? Like every other 'PC Repair' tool they've tested, the new apps signal-to-noise ratio is quite bad, and it misses the obvious and important problems, like out-of-date videocard drivers."

8 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. fp by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    A couple weeks ago, while browsing around the library downtown, I had to take a piss. As I entered the john, Barack Obama -- the messiah himself -- came out of one of the booths. I stood at the urinal looking at him out of the corner of my eye as he washed his hands. He didn't once look at me. He was busy and in any case I was sure the secret service wouldn't even let me shake his hand.

    As soon as he left I darted into the booth he'd vacated, hoping there might be a lingering smell of shit and even a seat still warm from his sturdy ass. I found not only the smell but the shit itself. He'd forgotten to flush. And what a treasure he had left behind. Three or four beautiful specimens floated in the bowl. It apparently had been a fairly dry, constipated shit, for all were fat, stiff, and ruggedly textured. The real prize was a great feast of turd -- a nine inch gastrointestinal triumph as thick as his cock -- or at least as I imagined it!

    I knelt before the bowl, inhaling the rich brown fragrance and wondered if I should obey the impulse building up inside me. I'd always been a liberal democrat and had been on the Obama train since last year. Of course I'd had fantasies of meeting him, sucking his cock and balls, not to mention sucking his asshole clean, but I never imagined I would have the chance. Now, here I was, confronted with the most beautiful five-pound turd I'd ever feasted my eyes on, a sausage fit to star in any fantasy and one I knew to have been hatched from the asshole of Barack Obama, the chosen one.

    Why not? I plucked it from the bowl, holding it with both hands to keep it from breaking. I lifted it to my nose. It smelled like rich, ripe limburger (horrid, but thrilling), yet had the consistency of cheddar. What is cheese anyway but milk turning to shit without the benefit of a digestive tract?

    I gave it a lick and found that it tasted better then it smelled.

    I hesitated no longer. I shoved the fucking thing as far into my mouth as I could get it and sucked on it like a big half nigger cock, beating my meat like a madman. I wanted to completely engulf it and bit off a large chunk, flooding my mouth with the intense, bittersweet flavor. To my delight I found that while the water in the bowl had chilled the outside of the turd, it was still warm inside. As I chewed I discovered that it was filled with hard little bits of something I soon identified as peanuts. He hadn't chewed them carefully and they'd passed through his body virtually unchanged. I ate it greedily, sending lump after peanutty lump sliding scratchily down my throat. My only regret was that Barack Obama wasn't there to see my loyalty and wash it down with his piss.

    I soon reached a terrific climax. I caught my cum in the cupped palm of my hand and drank it down. Believe me, there is no more delightful combination of flavors than the hot sweetness of cum with the rich bitterness of shit. It's even better than listening to an Obama speech!

    Afterwards I was sorry that I hadn't made it last longer. But then I realized that I still had a lot of fun in store for me. There was still a clutch of virile turds left in the bowl. I tenderly fished them out, rolled them into my handkerchief, and stashed them in my briefcase. In the week to come I found all kinds of ways to eat the shit without bolting it right down. Once eaten it's gone forever unless you want to filch it third hand out of your own asshole. Not an unreasonable recourse in moments of desperation or simple boredom.

    I stored the turds in the refrigerator when I was not using them but within a week they were all gone. The last one I held in my mouth without chewing, letting it slowly dissolve. I had liquid shit trickling down my throat for nearly four hours. I must have had six orgasms in the process.

    I often think of Barack Obama dropping solid gold out of his sweet, pink asshole every day, never knowing what joy it could, and at least once did, bring to a grateful democrat.

  2. ssdwee oijio0j w3455 xxasdfer23aj oojlkj by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    This is what it would be like, if the majority of people were athiests.
    ATHIEST KID: Mom, I'm going to go fuck a hooker.
    ATHIEST MOM: Okay, son.
    ATHIEST KID: Afterwards, I'm going to go smoke pot with my friends, since it's "not addictive."
    ATHIEST MOM: Okay, come home soon!

    The athiest kid leaves the room. The father comes home from work several minutes later.

    ATHIEST DAD: Hey!
    ATHIEST MOM: Hi, honey! I'm pregnant again. I guess I'll just get another abortion, since "fetuses don't count as human life."
    ATHIEST DAD: Okay, get as many abortions as you want!
    ATHIEST MOM: Oh, and don't go in the bedroom.
    ATHIEST DAD: Why not?
    ATHIEST MOM: There are two gay men fucking eachother in there.
    ATHIEST DAD: Why are they here?
    ATHIEST MOM: I wanted to watch them do it for awhile. They just aren't finished yet.
    ATHIEST DAD: Okay, that's fine with me!

    Suddenly, their neighbor runs into the house.

    ATHIEST NEIGHBOR: Come quick, there's a Christian outside!
    ATHIEST MOM: We'll be right there!

    The athiest couple quickly put on a pair of black robes and hoods. They then exit the house, and run into the street, where a Christian is nailed to a large, wooden X. He is being burned alive. A crowd of athiests stand around him, all wearing black robes and hoods.

    RANDOM ATHIEST: Damn you, Christian! We hate you! We claim to be tolerant of all religions. But we really hate your's! That's because we athiests are hypocritical like that! Die, Christian!

    THE END

    Scary, isn't it?

    1. Re:ssdwee oijio0j w3455 xxasdfer23aj oojlkj by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      Why do Christians wear seat belts in states where it's optional? Why do Christians cry at funerals? Shouldn't they be happy to die? Yet clearly they aren't. I think that's because even they don't believe their own bullshit on some deep level. If their bullshit was real they wouldn't have to advertise it so hard.

    2. Re:ssdwee oijio0j w3455 xxasdfer23aj oojlkj by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      _I_ cry because they usually owed me money, and my mom keeps hitting me for whining about it.

  3. Re:Oh, come on... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    i've been using my baseball bat to fix people who claim installing ubuntu is a good idea for the average pc user.

    so far it has worked every time.

  4. Re:Pretty useful by magamiako1 · · Score: 0, Troll
    Because I feel like feeding the troll...

    Creepy Crawler:

    Ext3 file defragmentation

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3#Defragmentation

    Consequently the successor to the ext3 filesystem, ext4, includes a filesystem defragmentation utility and support for extents (contiguous file regions).

    Also: http://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/New_ext4_features

    Looks like defragmenting is coming to Linux as well, so there goes your argument with that.

    Garbageware

    Just because an OEM would put Linux on a machine does not necessarily mean it won't come pre-loaded with a large amount of crap. It would, and if you think differently you're fooling yourself otherwise. In fact, I'm willing to bet given the "open" nature of Linux, that the garbageware would not only be installed on the system, it would be a core part of the system. There would be no removing it. While this is merely nothing more than conjecture, it's a very real scenario. Microsoft does not allow the OEMs to modify core parts of the OS, but an OEM could modify a core part of any Linux variant and, for example, include advertisements all the way around your applications.

    That's a wait-and-see thing but certainly very possible.

    Quote: MS could have done this the Right Way. Chroot is your friend. Programs that whine about XYZ not being where it is, then throwing up a UAC prompt is not the right way to do things. Instead, they could have made a default CHROOT environment for each program, with access to the users home directory.

    Unfortunately it isn't quite this simple. In order to maintain backwards compatibility, which is a very important thing moving from here on out, software needs a level of interaction with the system. Whether or not this is/was the correct way to do things is up for discussion, but Microsoft has made it available for software to be coded correctly many years ago. They just never enforced it. Why? Who knows. Now they chose to enforce it, but also offer the user a choice.

    UAC and Sudo are very, very similar.

    The only exception being that sudo can allow you to elevate yourself and do things without getting bugged again until you are finished.
    Of course, it can be argued that this in and of itself doesn't really solve the problem.

    If you want to see a fully secure environment, just take a look at SELinux and get back to me. See for yourself how difficult it is to operate an OS and manage it with multiple tiers of users when you don't have root access.

    Quote: Once I get it, I need to go into properties (or commandline) and go set the executable bit. If I dont do this, the OS refuses to run it. Now, is his a bad program? Nope. But it solves the "run_anything_from_email" and related issues in MS based systems.

    It can be argued that having to flag a program as executable would be a serious problem for the user. Look only so far at the negative reception of UAC, which you took a jab on earlier. Having to nag the user to take extra steps when they just want to run an application is begging for a serious amount of whining. So your proposed solution really doesn't solve this in any way.

    Quote: Now, IE will open up and run whatever.

    How long has it been since you've run IE? IE will not just "run whatever". It will actually bug the user multiple times whether or not they want to allow the application. There are security dialogs, warnings, and a final "Accept/Install" before you're allowed to run or install any ActiveX file. Again, providing the user a choice. Sure, most users click OK and this is a serious problem, but would you rather the OS just not allow you to do something?

    It's actually kind of funny because as the web seems to evolve we appear to be getting more and more to the point where a browser is an execution environment. It's not a si

  5. Re:I wonder what they were expecting. by lamapper · · Score: 1, Troll

    ...but in the end, Microsoft's ... Tool suffers the same problem ... they don't work.

    From personal experience of over 10 years with M$ Windows, (I have over 25 years of experience in IT) this is straight out of their play book. This is business as usual. And we use to say that IBM meant I have Been Mislead.

    New product released...

    New product does not work as advertised...

    M$ has NO FIX for new product and knows it...

    marketplace does not like to hear that M$ can't fix

    M$ provides BS troubleshooting tool (i.e. General Protection Fault, GPF, Troubleshooting Guide (Windows running on top of DOS) was my first business as usual experience with M$ BS). Windows 95 helped, but it still happened. This new PC Repair tool is more of the same.

    M$ hopes market will buy BS and not switch forever to another operating system; they want to keep you around and will promise you exactly what they think you want to hear, promising the next release of the software will be better.

    They understand once a user switches to current Linux systems (they have improved so much) and users discover what they can do with it (most general users will work with it out of the box without problems) that the users will not be there for the next version of M$ operating system. Especially when you can get it so cheap, a subnotebook for $399 that lets you do almost everything....so many options available...

    Not trying to flame or bait anyone, just stating facts as I have experienced it since the days of DOS 2.0. Yes I remember when there was NOT a M$ company out there. Mod me as you wish, but this experience is first hand. If you had wasted days going through that BS 30 - 60 page GPF troubleshooting guide as many of us System Administrators did back in the day, all the while M$ phone support (company paid for it) stating that it had worked for them, therefore it should work for us and they could not understand what was wrong....perhaps you need to reinstall the operating system yet again....

    I went through that guide, page by page, line by line twice before I said forget it. It never could have worked and M$ knew it. At my location, I had almost 50 servers (file & domain, OS2, NT, Solaris; email, Lotus Notes and print servers) and 400+ desktops (It was at a telco so the desktops were primarily DOS/Windows, OS/2, Windows 95/98/NT Windows; we had some Sun and SparcStations also - of course they did not run M$ apps) and I did not have multiple days to waste on lies....Don't even try to defend them, they lied out and out. And I KNOW IT because I was forced to live it.

    One M$ support person had the audacity to state unequivocally that it worked for him, therefore I must be doing something wrong...that's why I tried the guide a second time, I was pissed and wanted to make sure I had not made some stupid rookie mistake... I HAD NOT!

    I would have respected them more if they would have just told me the truth (that they did NOT have an answer or a fix that worked) so that I would not have wasted my time. They could have said sorry, we will have a fix with the next release, in the meantime just remind your users to periodically save their data and reboot their systems. That was the truth.

    I know, I know, the marketplace is less forgiving...but is that really a good excuse?

    Even with the MacIntosh (my Mac usage was years ago) I would save frequently and now with Linux, I still save frequently...I hate redoing work even if its just a paragraph in a word processing document.

    Eventually that was the solution, after the PC was tweaked as well as it could be, to just remind the users to back up their data periodically and reboot when their PC locked up. By the time NT 3.51 & Windows 95 came around you could pretty much count on not having problems if you shut your PC off at lunch and booted back up when you returned. Win 98 and W

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