MS getting it right!

Two things recently have shown that MS do listen to users and can get it right.

Firstly OnceCare Live beta.  I was offered a chance to try it out so thought what the hell.  I had originally Zone Alarm basic and windows firewall, AVG Free and Defender beta.  I uninstalled the ZA and AVG and installed the OC beta.  It's great, it tells me in non-geek speak what it's doing, it advises me rather than dictates and most of all it works.  It sits in the background and tries it's best not to be obtrusive and I'm happy using it. My hats of to MS for getting it right!  I installed NAV and McAffee ISS and they put loads of icons, popups, info box and other crap all over the place telling how they are protecting you when all you want to do is surf.  My only gripe with OC beta was it's insistence that I was not 100% safe because I had not installed IE7, I'd prefer it to detect I had changed my default browser to FF and assume I was safe for using this.

Secondly (yes like I said they got it right twice!).  WGA.... yes I hate it and was shocked to find out that it was now restricting unlicenced XP installs.  A colleague at work had received WGA as a recent update and the next she rebooted it had restricted her internet access via IE.  She was redirected to a screen about WGA and checking licence codes so she rang me for advice. I offered to fix it one night after work but she needed the PC sooner than I could visit.  So I said follow the instructions and see if you can fix it yourself, I pointed out that her PC was bought legit and it should have a Windows Licence sticker on the side of the box.  Anyway I saw her the following day and she was happy with herself as she had fixed it and it was "quite easy to do".  Turns out that the firm Time (not bankrupt!) had built all the machine from a cloned image and not entered the correct licence key based on the one attached to the box.  She had downloaded the tool to check the licence key and it did not match so she then followed the instructions from the web page to enter her correct licence key and rebooted.  Bingo everything was fine and she was surfing again. I'm impressed that a non techy was able to check and correct her licence key without having to read pages of technical articles and the process turned out to be easy and resolved the issue quickly for her.  Like I say I'm not a fan of WGA, and in this case it was a false positive due the system builder, but the system helped her to validate and fix it herself.

So I thought I just say something nice about MS .... for a change