Nathan Diehl

If you’ve ever heard me complain about Microsoft,
well, let me rephrase that…if you’ve never heard me complain about Microsoft, we should spend more time together.

historically, i have not been a big fan of Microsoft. I think they produce a sub-par product at a very high premium. i have often used their tutorials and help files, and rarely ever find anything helpful.

This week, i was working on a network reconfiguration, and some clients would not connect to the Internet. Every client would easily connect to the network, and could ping, and could even access the gateway. but it just would not connect to the Internet. I spent a total of about seven hours on the phone, and was finally told there was nothing more they could do.
So as i was sitting at one of the clients, I had open Internet Explorer 7. When i would type in a domain name, it would just continually process. No time out, just constant loading. I had earlier noticed there was a page up that said something about ‘click here to run connection diagnostics,’ and i immediately thought, ‘yeah, it will ask me, ‘did you restart your computer’ and ‘did you verify it was plugged in’ — just typical, stupid windows questions.
But when i clicked the diagnostics button, it processed for about 60 seconds, and then said something like:

Internet Explorer has detected some corruption in the winsock proxy installation. Do you want to reset this value for the next restart?

and i was thinking, ‘what? it fixed it that quick?’

and sure enough, that is what cost me about 13 hours of work over a period of a week. Just some stupid winsock proxy settings on some of my clients. it was a very easy fix (due to a KB article at support.microsoft.com)

So, i learned that Microsoft actually is getting better…that is a very good thing. hopefully it is a trend that will continue for some time!

have you ever had a similar experience?

Popularity: 2%

2 Comments »