Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Microsoft. How to annoy people

Well I'm getting on pretty well with my new PC that I got for Christmas, and generally I'm very impressed with MS Vista as an operating system. I've only found one of my existing programs that doesn't run on Vista, and that's Pinnacle Studio Plus 9 - a video editing suite. Shame really, I quite liked it, but I've already dabbled with Windows Movie Maker that comes with Vista, and it's acceptable (for my level of fiddling anyway, at least for the moment).
More annoying though is that I have a problem with Outlook 2002 which has filled my PIM needs completely since I've had it. Vista has a "known" issue with OL 2002 (and prior versions), and refuses to recognise the password you put into your email account when you set it up, forcing you to enter it every time you open OL to send and receive mail. It's not the end of the world by any means, but it's annoying, and apparently although there are work arounds involving scripts and executable files, Micorsoft have no plans to resolve this problem. I bet they could very easily if they wanted to, but equally I bet they'd much rather you upgraded to a later version of Outlook. Well stuff them. I'm not going to.
Vista does come with Windows Mail and Windows Contacts and Windows Calendar, of which the first is the "new" Outlook Express (a completely different program to Outlook for those who don't know about these things), but I don't want to use them. I want to keep using the program I've been using without problem for several years, and which serves me well. This is exactly the sort of problem and annoyance that companies like Microsoft do , almost certainly deliberately, and which really hack (sic) end users off.

Update
And something else that's occurred to me....this must be a deliberate "oversight", because as far as I know, all the rest of OL 2002 works fine with Vista. If all the rest's OK, why not this bit! Grrr...

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