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

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!

Microsoft should replace support team with llm chatbot. Much better.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

I said this before on another thread, but the only time sfc /scannow actually did something was when I had a machine with a drive that had a few bad blocks.

And of course it didn’t actually fix anything because a system DLL was corrupt so DISM couldn’t even repair the system, meaning the only solution was to reinstall windows.

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

Found the post on the forums. The screenshot omits the comment from Craig who said “I ended up wiping windows and installing Ubuntu instead”.

I found this reply helpful too, and so should you.

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…

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.

I mean the guy’s name is literally Mac DePriest, so either MacOS or Temple OS.

Semi-relevant xkcd, but replace the last sentence with “Oh, he just wiped Windows and installed Ubuntu? Uh, cool, that works too.”