I reported it on answer.microsoft.com. They asked for a crash dump. Complied. Another non-ms person analyzed the crash dump and suggested that it's USB 3.0 related. Disabling that in the BIOS solved the issue.

But the MS guys kept on going. A few weeks later, a reply that they managed to get their hands on a similar device (!!, cost about $200), but they couldn't find a driver, so they asked for mine. Pointed them to the online driver location (hidden on manufacturer site). Some time after that they commented that they managed to reproduce the BSOD. A few months later they released a fix (into Windows).

I had one of those, and the Vista drivers were never released as a production version. Driver support for it was THE thing that kept me from upgrading from XP to 7, and also what convinced me to never again buy a Creative product.

The matter became moot, and XP took a hike, when it finally crapped out one day. My audio interface is now a Focusrite.

At least not from a Microsoft employee. Sadly, the majority of posts from Microsoft employees I have seen basically repeat the problem description, followed by "Did I understand that correctly?", sometimes people get generic advice like reboot their computer, make sure their system has all available updates installed, etc.

Most of the time I get the impression the person writing it is a employee who is reading someone else's notes, has no idea what the answer even is, and then does the best to cover it up by using abstractions, off topic insight and buzz words.

Sorry Microsoft just my opinion regarding this one area. Room to improve maybe ?

Google promotes normal users to moderators on their support forums if they just post enough, so instead of being brushed off by some underpaid employee you are being ignored and ridiculed by someone not even being paid to!

Seriously, it can't be that hard to call the NT equivalent of strerror(3) when formatting these messages.

Fwiw the identifier you posted isn't a UUID but the same justification applies.

but with Linux, the case for me is that given enough time, I can usually find all the information I need to figure it out. With Windows it's Google for 10 minutes then throw my hands in the air and figure out a workaround.

I'm not sure which is better for my productivity: realizing that I accidentally screwed up my DNS resolver and spending the next hour hunting through forum posts and man pages before finding the snippet that explains what I was supposed to do and reconfiguring my resolved.conf symlink or figuring out the quickest, crudest workaround on Windows.

Stackoverflow really changed the game. I really should get active there again to give back more, I can't tell you how much a random stackover/superuser question helped me narrow down an issue.

Also, has everyone forgotten about IRC?

You just have to be tricky: People will not help you, but as pedantic as they are, they’ll correct mistakes you make.

You go there, and say "I’m disappointed that you can’t even use <device> with Linux" and you’ll get hundreds of answers telling you exactly how to use it.

True! However, obligatory "Gentoo is rice" link: https://fun.irq.dk/funroll-loops.org/

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

source: I got trolled by swedes in #linux before abandoning that wasteland for greener pastures listed above.

Arch? You need to make sure you're not looking at something a decade old.

I often just scope my google search.

Also, I do not find that I can answer every question easily for linux, even though I've used it as my primary OS since ~2002 and have some idea what to google for.

In fact, I have both sound and bluetooth issues on my machine right now that I have given up trying to resolve.

I have seen my fair share of this in the Windows world, too. Edit registry keys you never even heard of, use that (mostly undocumented) command invocation (I'm look at you, SharePoint!), edit that XML file that sits in a place where it does not even make sense...

On Linux (and other Unix systems), at least you have man pages, on Windows I cannot recall a single instance where the builtin help system has actually helped me. I mean, even MS-freaking-DOS had a reasonably useful builtin help.

With Linux, at least it gets better once you get the hang of it. Microsoft's sorry excuse for documentation is (mostly) a joke. (The exception are developer tools - the documentation on T-SQL and the .Net framework classes is fairly good, even though it's such a mess that it's easier to Google for specific entries than using the TOC or the builtin search... once I find what I was looking for, I do usually find a helpful answer to my question.)

(To be fair, when I first started using Linux, I found it incredibly strange, complicated, confusing and intimidating; within the first six months of using Linux, I was this close to literally throwing my PC out the window on no less than three occasions. So I know the frustration you speak of.)

If I went back to trying Linux, I'd need a suite of 'just-works' solutions; Plug & Play was the main reason my family moved from DR-DOS & Norton Commander to 95. And of course driver compatibility.

Honestly, if I went to an open OS from 7 at this point, I'd go to ReactOS.

Man get-command

Get-help get-help

But I agree, PowerShell is a huge improvement.

It's a lot harder to pull a specific, coherent, considered answer out of the internet, which doesn't involve duct tape and breakable insecure awful things.

"How do I run x on startup" will as likely get you "download this Ruby script which calls IFTTT.com triggered by when your network adapter connects, btw install this binary wifi driver blob" as "put this with a plain text password in /etc/whoknowsbutitworks lol" as "on your distro with your shell the startup system is XYZ and the startup scripts run like a then b then /home/user/c so put it in ~/c"

To be fair, that isn't specific to Microsoft, and a lot of big company's support sites are useless.

IME, Apple's Q&A discussion site is equally useless. The answers there are always along the lines of "That's by design, you can't do that." or "Why do you want to turn that off anyway?!?" I've had much better luck on apple.stackexchange.com

This. I can remember asking years ago, back when I had to work on OS X, asking how to turn off that freakin' annoying jumping icon in the system tray that leaped up and down after every successful print job until you dismissed it, just like an excited two-year-old telling you they went potty in the potty chair AGAIN, "Just like a big kid!" I can't imagine anyone thinking that attention-grabbing, ADHD-exacerbating, flow-destroying behavior was good by design, but was asked, "Why do you want to turn that off anyway?"