Submitted by Common Windows problems could soon be solved by clicking a “Fix It” button. Microsoft has started putting the button on its web-based support pages that detail the most common problems hitting PC and Windows users. Clicking the button kicks off a download that, once run, carries out the series of steps needed to fix a specific problem or remove a bug. Microsoft also has plans to extend the click-to-fix system to help users recover from a crash.
I mean… Instead of giving a button to fix common problems… couldn’t they manage to avoid the problems of happening in the first place ???
Sure, some users do create problems on their own, even though I bet they have been misguided by a poorly designed tool in many cases… but that’s only sometimes 🙂
The same could be said about Linux. Crap breaks all the time for me on Linux systems, often for no reason I can discern without spending 30-60 minutes digging around in shitty Perl code or something along those lines. Do an apt-get/yum update and some random addon script will end up breaking, or a cron script hits some condition it didn’t expect and stops working right, or so on. I have Linux systems break all on their own far, far more often than I ever see a Windows system break without a user doing something directly to cause the situation.
It doesn’t help when you have a lot of third-party tools installed either, which happens on both Windows and Linux systems (albeit far more often on Windows systems). The developers test the crap out of their pretty little prepackaged environment, but once you step out of the bounds of what they’ve put together for you, anything can (and probably will) go wrong.
You can’t force a user to not break his OS any more than you can force a user to not rear-end another vehicle on the road… all you can do is make it less likely for the damage to be catastrophic and make it easier to repair.
My sister for instance has her XP install break once a month or so, almost certainly because of her idiot boyfriend who got her into playing pirated games (which pretty much are just trojan delivery mechanisms). Windows can’t stop a user who intentionally ignores all warnings and safety precautions any more than a car can stop a driver who chooses to ignore traffic signals.
digging around in shitty Perl code or something along those lines
Hahaha.. Nah man, it’s Python these days. Perl is sooo 2006.
Python is so ROXOR!!!! \m/ \m/ Yeah!!!
Edited 2009-02-07 11:23 UTC
This is a great idea. I actually posted a similar idea to ubuntu brainstorm. When you have an issue, you search an ‘official’ site and if you find a resolution, there would be a link to a script that would do some actions.
I don’t think this is really for novice users. Most of the time, they don’t even go check MSDN or knowledge articles. I think it’s more for the intermediate or advanced user that wants to do something tricky or work around certain issues.
Let’s just hope they can keep it secure. I’d hate to see fix it buttoms popping up on fake sites or it somehow being hijacked.
I really like this idea. After all, why bother trying to get someone to click and type a lot of things in sequence to do something when a script could do it just as well.
However it would be even cooler if instead of saying “fix it” it would be something like “show me how to fix it” and after running the tool it would actually graphically go through the motions of bringing up the correct settings dialog and making the appropriate change. Then the user might actually learn something and be able to fix things themselves in the future.
You realize that you are talking about the help system of Mac OS 8, do you?
This sounds about as effective as the trouble shooting wizard in Windows 98. Allow me to share a little anecdote. First, I’ll say I found out months later from a friend that my problem was that I only had the Windows drivers for my sound card, not the DOS ones, which is why DOS programs had screechy crap instead of sound. The trouble shooting wizard did not even hint at this.
Me: Hmmm… That doesn’t sound good… I wonder if this trouble shooter thingy can help…
*Trouble shooter asks what’s wrong. Asking for literal text input instead of selecting from a menu or a set of check boxes. Not a good start, breaking one of the simplest interface guidelines*
Me: (types) sound card not working correctly for DOS programs
After a series of questions, all of which I answered “no” to, the trouble shooter gives me the enlightening solution: “Your sound card isn’t working correctly. Have you tried reinstalling the drivers?” with the last words being a link to a help file showing how. Yes… Of course I did… Any problem in Windows, first solution is to check the drivers – At the time, how was I to know that I’d need DOS drivers as well as Windows ones. Both that computer and my previous Win98 one were practically fresh off the shelf, from a shop, and I’d never had that problem with my last one.
Haha, I remember those troubleshooting wizards. Not a bit of help, and many times I find the MS webpages to be just as unhelpful. Let me share a little anicdote of my own.
I was setting up a Windows XP installation for a buddy of mine and was going through the Windows update process. This was a bit before sp3 came out, you know, when there were about 100 updates that needed to be installed unless you had a slipstreamed cd handy, which I didn’t at the time. Well, after attempting to get windows update to work, it returned an error code (can’t remember what the code was anymore). Anyway, after I looked up that code, the web page gave me a list of steps to try including removing various temporary files, removing and reinstalling the Microsoft update SSL certificate, and several other steps. Not one of them helped at all. To make a long story short, know what it was? It was the computer’s system clock. I have no idea how this happened, but the year on the system clock somehow got set to 6473, a value which most hardware clocks can’t even be set to and one that windows won’t usually allow you to set. Naturally this triggered an update verification error due to the 32-bit system and problems with the epoch having looped around many times over. Now, shame on me for not checking the system date in the first place (I guess I figured the hardware clock’s time would simply carry over as it usually does to the new installation), but still. You would think that one of those steps on the MS webpage would have said something like “Check your computer’s date and time, as invalid settings there can result in windows update failing to work.” I’ve encountered other situations like this as well, where the MS pages were just about as far off the mark as they could be. Sometimes they miss the most obvious reasons for a problem.
Anyway, just thought I’d share that while we were sharing windows troubleshooting stories.
edit: Accidentally wrote sp2 instead of sp3.
Edited 2009-02-06 23:06 UTC
So now hundreds of millions of clueless sheep^W^W windows users will grow accustomed to running “scripts” that come from the *internet* and with *full admin privileges* as long as (they can believe that) those scripts are coming from “holy MS”?
I ‘m sure there must be *huge* blackkhat parties all over the globe as we speak 🙂