No, not Solitaire. Vista, the world’s most-hated OS. A man brought me a PC that could no longer dial out. It was a Conexant software modem and HP had a driver for it. All Vista would report was that the device “had a problem:”. Helpful, eh? The device manager did not even list a modem but called it a communications device. We downloaded the driver from HP but it failed to install with a cryptic message that HP states usually means nothing is wrong.
While we had the machine in the lab we did some updates to see whether that might be a problem. One service pack and dozens of updates later, there was no change. The thing now reported it had no driver and did not need one. We found fax modem software had been installed but was nowhere to be found. I asked the device manager to “scan for new devices” and suddenly the modem was there in the list all ready to go. I could disable and re-enable it, so I presume the driver does something. I wish on-line/HP chat help had suggested that, but they did not. They suggested uninstalling Norton, which was new and FireFox which was newer. It’s a good thing I wasn’t charging by the hour. The guy could have just handed over the machine as payment for the fiddling done.
This is an example of the high cost of using that other OS. Full of conveniences but costing much more than its price in downtime and labour. The world is not employed by M$ but does its bidding on hundreds of millions of machines. You should send M$ the bill.
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