Dear Microsoft, Goodbye

Dear Microsoft,
I've held strong with you for the past 15 years but the frustration I felt today has left me with no choice but to leave you.

Before I begin to rant you should know that I am your ideal consumer. Here is a bit of my history, I bought a new computer with Vista Ultimate. I use windows media center to record tv shows onto an external hard drive and play all of my media through a launch XBOX 360.

Today one of my 3 external hard drives died. It's not a big deal, I back up all my data and having a 5 year old hard drive die is commonplace. What is a big deal, is that since I had this drive indexed and because the hard drive can no longer be read the windows indexer fails to start. Now, creating new folders or moving/renaming files takes on average 30-40 seconds per operation. Any average user may have tried to troubleshoot this issue only to find that in the indexer options there is no choice to fix the indexer or to turn it back on. I'm a more advanced user and spent a couple hours browsing the net looking for answers and found this site:

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/85803-index-windows-search-service.html

It's a great site but unfortunately their suggestions did not help, nor did any of the other methods I tried. Much to my suprise I found nothing in the SP1 release to indicate that this would be fixed. I even tried using the vista ultimate cd to repair the installation which also failed. I'm now left with one option ... reformatting. And I will reformat ... only I won't be putting Vista back on.

I gave you more chances than you deserved and I won't come back until you put the consumer FIRST and not businesses. Doesn't it strike you as odd when Apple releases and update to OSX with many user friendly additions or when ubuntu stream lines an interface that was confusing before and then you spend over 1 year working on SP1 and I honestly can't say that there is one good thing in there that is VISIBLE to the user. Sure you fixed some bugs and made file copying faster. DID THAT REALLY TAKE 1 YEAR!!!

It's almost as if you've gotten so big you can't move any more. Apple and Ubuntu are running circles around you ... WAKE UP!