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they've tested, the new apps signal-to-noise ratio is quite bad, and it misses the obvious and important problems, like out-of-date videocard drivers."

Comments

Re:I wonder what they were expecting.

[lamapper]

...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