Rant, Microsoft Windows support
The thing I hate about supporting Windows is that MS really doesn't make it easy to troubleshoot faults.
Someone asked for help on MS answers for Windows seeming to hang at the Welcome screen. The support response was to 1)perform startup repair 2) roll back to a previous restore point 3) boot repair 4) Windows repair
None of these things worked but this is the sort of support I see daily; throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.
Rant, Microsoft Windows support
This happens in my workplace too, trying to troubleshoot software faults is too obtuse for anyone other than the software devs to do so if the standard fixes don't work then next option is to give the user a fresh install of Windows. This ultimately does not fix the fault but kicks it down the road for a few months.
Rant, Microsoft Windows support
We've got an issue where some users have something in their profile that causes Calculator to not run at all when they logon to a device for the first time and to fix it we have to clear the reg keys from the machine. No one has yet worked out how to stop this from happening.
Rant, Microsoft Windows support
Caveat this is my experience; almost every fault that I've had to troubleshoot at work or at home has been something that has had so many obtuse suggestions for fixes that ultimately don't work because MS has a cryptic logging system that hardly anyone understands. Supporting Windows feels an awful lot like trying to satisfy a child who can't yet speak rather than actually investigating a fault.
Rant, Microsoft Windows support
The amount of times we get incidents saying "We've tried installing this application and it keeps failing. Even the build team can't work out why it's failing to install so please rebuild the machine" is ultimately not surprising but frankly a shame.
Rant, Microsoft Windows support
@renbymon probably also by design, because the more you understand faults, the more you can reverse engineer software.
Rant, Microsoft Windows support
@maxine Honestly that wouldn't surprise me, maybe even to sell MCPs too.
Rant, Microsoft Windows support
Contrast this with Linux where, in my experience, I can parse human readable (compared to MS) log files and actually puzzle out the fault before either fixing the issue or feedback directly to the dev.