• @[email protected]
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    3 hours ago
    • help my mouse does not work

    - did you try reinstalling windows?

    • did you try updating to Windows 11, enabling copilot and microsoft drive automatic upload?
  • @[email protected]
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    2812 hours ago

    Even more infuriating are those messages marked [FIXED] when the freaking post had a negative response or no response at all from the user.
    Those forums should be full of endless posts marked [PENDING] or [EXPIRED].

  • @[email protected]
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    2414 hours ago

    Very accurate 😂

    Man, I hate all the boilerplate that Microsoft uses in their documentation, it’s a pain to read anything.

  • Possibly linux
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    6522 hours ago

    I’m John from Microsoft and I have over 25 years of experience.

    Please update your drivers and run run sfc /scannow.

    I hope that helps,

    John

    • @[email protected]
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      2013 hours ago

      That’s right, linux is terrible since you have to use terminal. Microsoft doesn’t have terrible things like terminal. Just copy paste these commands into run.

        • @[email protected]
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          79 hours ago

          With an alternative method involving a page in settings that only existed between may 2015 and feb 2016.

        • @[email protected]
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          611 hours ago

          I think now it’s Windows Cloud Commander 11000, soon to be re-integrated into your Office 366 account. Elevated privileges require a premium subscription.

  • @[email protected]
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    471 day ago

    The most pissing thing is that the Microsoft “support” forum is always the top search result. Sometimes it occupies 5 or more of the top search results.

    …but I haven’t had to deal with that since I switched to Linux last year, so…yay!

  • @[email protected]
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    1 day ago

    Why is Microsoft’s support so completely and utterly useless, anyway? Do they purposely hire people who don’t understand how computers work for their support team? They almost always reply with a “solution” that has absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand. Why are they so bad and their jobs?

    • @[email protected]
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      49 hours ago

      My guess is they oursourced the work to people who only understand basic English and answer the question they were able to decipher from a few keywords and the assumption that the question is about the most basic aspect of those keywords.

    • @zipzoopaboop
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      713 hours ago

      My favorite one was an issue with a device not showing up when plugged in, and their solution is to click on it and reinstall drivers

    • @[email protected]
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      914 hours ago

      Because they’re not Microsoft support. Microsoft Answers is a user forum and the “MVPs” there providing “support” are at best volunteers and at worst bots.

    • @[email protected]
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      271 day ago

      As a user, it seems to me that Microsoft figured out a way to get the customers they care about to hire and pay for their own “Microsoft support” people.

      If I have a problem at work with one of those M365 websites I use, or with the Windows partition I don’t, and I can’t fix it myself, the person helping me is going to be a fellow employee and not [email protected].

  • @[email protected]
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    511 day ago

    Honestly a month ago me and my friend were looking at microsoft forums. One of which was somebody asking why tiktok was preinstalled in windows 11. Forum admin replied that it was bloat from a manufacturer of the hardware. It was a homebuilt computer and fresh copy of windows 11 home.

    28 more people said windows 11 did this by default, the admin eventually realized it was not accidental or a fluke. Which he previously eluded to.

    Shows the current state of windows 11

  • @[email protected]
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    541 day ago

    This is a huge upside of Linux. When something breaks you can make a web search and learn how to fix it, or that it’s unfixable. On windows you make a search and all you get is this bs and seo article spam

    • @[email protected]
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      311 hours ago

      Also - not just when something breaks? Like, you want to change the color of something, an icon, the default response to a key bind or behavior…. There are so many times when I’m forced to use commercial software and there’s some inane extra thing that is messing up my work flow, and there’s no way to change it.

      My Arch machine has only the things I want on it. I don’t have to dig into registry keys to disable Cortana or whatever. When I’m running on poverty hardware, dwm/xmonad are bare enough DEs that I can internet browsers smooth and fast.

      Linux will let you do whatever you want as long as you are smart/determined to spend hours googling.

  • @[email protected]
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    511 day ago

    The microsoft forums are the one place that could be fully automatized. You post a problem about anything, really anything. Can’t change wallpaper? Can’t login? Screen flashing? Files disappearing? Constant loud pitched noise? It’s all the same. The answer, whatever your issue, is sfc /scannow, “Restoration point” and “Reinstall”.

    And arguably, that last step will most likely make the issue go away, at the price of not having a fucking clue as to what was wrong, losing a lot of time afterward, and having a fair chance of re-doing the same things, causing the issue to show up again. Great stuff.

  • @[email protected]
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    701 day ago

    Ask about a specific error code on a windows forum: unhelpful boilerplate nonsense.

    Ask about the vaguest symptoms of a recurring problem on a linux forum: a neckbeard wizard will show up and have you type 30 cryptic commands in your terminal and everything will be fixed.

    • @[email protected]
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      111 hours ago

      The funniest part about this is that almost every linux installation is totally different from every other one, whereas every windows installation is almost identical.

      But really, I certainly wouldn’t enter any random commands I was given from the internet on a linux machine unless I knew damn well what they did.

  • @[email protected]
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    1321 day ago

    I saw a great one yesterday.

    Question: Help, I can’t boot, here’s the error code. I’m stuck in a loop and can’t get into windows.

    Answer: Open Microsoft explorer, navigate to…

  • dinckel
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    901 day ago

    The Microsoft support forums are on a whole level of their own, when it comes to being useless.

    sfc /scannow and the troubleshooting button in the settings do fuck all, and compared to the usual systemd journal, the event log rarely gives you any useful information whatsoever

    • @[email protected]
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      212 hours ago

      Actually I had an issue where trying to sign into my samba share caused explorer.exe to crash constantly, running sfc /scannow fixed it surprisingly. Glad that’s on my “these programs only work on Windows” system.

    • @[email protected]
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      213 hours ago

      I have never had ms troubleshoot button or autofix button ever do anything but return “no problems found”. And yes, I’ve also tried it in every one of those 20 control panels.

    • @[email protected]
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      401 day ago

      sfc /scannow does fix certain problems, just not nearly as many as the Microsoft support forum would like.

      I do agree with you on the log, although that’s often because whichever component is misbehaving just doesn’t believe in error logs. I’m looking at you, Nvidia.

      • dinckel
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        161 day ago

        Are you trying to say that error 43 isn’t the only thing you’d ever need to know about it?

    • Sabata
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      201 day ago

      DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth and pray it fixes everything before you reinstall.

    • @[email protected]
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      281 day ago

      sfc /scannow and the troubleshooting button in the settings do fuck all

      Hey, that’s not true! sfc takes forever to run, so it’s a good way to waste time and get even more frustrated.

    • @[email protected]
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      61 day ago

      It’s at the level where, after spending hours there, I feel like it has to be a conspiracy to waste your time. Because there is no way there could organically be that many posts about a topic without there being any useful or correct information.

  • @[email protected]
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    1 day ago

    You know, last time I’ve reached the MS forum, there was a support person there answering “No, there’s no way to disable the Teams pop-up that appears over your shared screen when you mute the microphone. Lots of people ask the same question, and the developers have no plans of changing this”.

    The answer was complete, helpful, and completely out of the normal for the forum. The only thing more out of character would be if Teams actually had an option to make it work as any sane person would expect, but then, this is not on the forum people.

    • @[email protected]
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      221 day ago

      Seems suspicious. There probably is such an option hidden somewhere. Because whenever you get a clear answer there, it’s invariably wrong.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 day ago

        Well, if you find it, please tell :)

        It’s a clear Microsoft paradox: is the support person right, or did Teams do something reasonable?