Why is Microsoft software so unreliable?

[urlwolf]

Why is microsoft software so unreliable?
How did we grow used to it?

My recent examples:
Hibernation and laptops:
Everytime I close the lid in my laptop, I have a good chance of not seeing my laptop come to life again. Having to reboot makes me miss some info and time.

Visual Studio:
No autosave, no temporary files
(but see http://www.codeguru....s/article.php/c3123/, solution pointed out here in this forum!)

Powerpoint:
Even with autosave 'on' and saving every minute, no temporary files. For the love of Pete, I cannot find temporary files anywhere. The 'autosaved' files offered in the left menu (we are used to those, right? that means we see plenty of crashes) are from several hours ago.

The intergalactic police should come and execute the responsables for so much suffering. Humanity would be better off without the careless programming that Microsoft practices.

Rant mode *off*.
PS: I have tried to move to Linux and actually spent about a year using it exclusively. But being a tweaker, I spent too much time doing unproductive things such as recompiling kernel, finding drivers, and looking for programs. It's not a solution for me.

[Gothi[c]]

Microsoft's answer would be that it's all because of other non-microsoft software you have installed.

The problem is probably that Microsoft is too big, and they have a horrible business policy.
I'm sure they have both very good and very bad programmers, but when you have very large teams, the chance of the few very bad programmers doing something horrible increase significantly.
The other problem is that their business policy is to eliminate all compitition, so naturally, it they put in a few crashes into their software here and there that they can blame on third party software, that's all for the better.

Yeah in Linux it's easy to get bitten by the tweaking bug, just because you CAN. I've been using gentoo for the longest time and lots of time was always spent on compiling and configuring etc,... though usually once I have it as I want I can start being productive. On my other machine I installed ubuntu(dapper), which pretty much worked out of the box, I didn't even need to compile any drivers into my kernel. So that saves some time, offcourse now i'm stuck with a gnome desktop. I always used either fluxbox or afterstep. I haven't gotten around to changing it yet, I might actually switch back to afterstep later, but it works for now. I'm not gonna start fiddling around too much again now that I'm finally being somewhat productive

[f0dder]

Personally I've never liked autosave - it's better to get a good habit of "one-on-control-anoter-on-s" regularly. I don't even think about that keyboard combo anymore, happens automatically. IMHO more reliable than autosave. (Oh, and VS saves on project builds btw.)

Use of temporary files for saving is generally a good idea though ("atomic commit" in a way). If it's not implemented in VS, I guess it's because "what could go wrong when saving a ~100kb file?" - *shrug*.

As for your laptop, the ACPI stuff needed for that to work well has horrible implementations on a lot of systems, so it's not necessarily Microsoft's fault. Problems can also be caused by third-party drivers not supporting the Windows Driver Model power-saving stuff properly.

[Edvard]

Gothi[c]: Surely you haven't forgotten

[Select]

apt-get afterstep

have you? 

Robust and discreet Autosave should be a feature offered in ANY app that involves document creation and modification. I learned that the first time I accidentally kicked the power box which was unwisely installed under our stations in high school computer class.

(Scene: Circa 1984 classful of Apple IIe's)

me- *kick*
computers- *bzt...*
me- "oops..."
computer class teacher- "Everybody remembered to save their work, right?"
class- *glaring at yours truly* "umm... no..."

[Josh]

I am with f0dder on this one. I make it a habit of hitting CTRL+S and saving my work every so often. This takes all of half a second and works very well. Auto-save, while a nice idea, can cause problems (What if it auto-saves something you didnt mean to do?). Anyways, I dont think that the lack of an auto-save feature should deem microsoft's software "unreliable".