Saturday, July 13, 2013

Is Microsoft Going to the Dogs?

I sell a lot on eBay and I print my own shipping labels on my home/office printer... it saves me a lot of time at the Post Office and also saves me about 10% on postage.  The other day I had an especially large package to ship so I decided to ship it via UPS which is much cheaper than the USPS when shipping large boxes.  When I went to print the UPS label I had a problem.  The label that came out of the printer was all jumbled up and overwritten on the left side of the label.  No problem... I just printer another one... with the same result.  Wow.  I have an account with UPS so I made the phone call to see what the problem might be.  Well, as it turns out, Microsoft Internet Explorer is not compatible with the label printing program that UPS uses. I had to switch to Mozilla Firefox as my browser in order to print the label.  No problem... all's well that ends well, I guess. 
Now, I understand that this could be a problem on the UPS end of things, but I have also been having other new and recent problems with Internet Explorer.  After some automatic updates it seems that I am now using I.E. 10, and I have found several bugs in it already.  Don't ask if I tried to report these bugs to Microsoft.  Actually, I did, but I couldn't even understand the guys on the other end of the customer support line.  Yes, guys... plural.  I called twice and I believe I was speaking to guys to whom English is a second language... or third... or fourth.  I got pretty darn frustrated so I did some research, which always helps give me peace of mind.  lol.   What I found out is that it is virtually impossible to report a bug to Microsoft.  It is so frustrating that I won't even go into it.  If you really want to get upset just "Google" the words Microsoft bug report.  I read where one guy even paid $35 to register his complaint.  You can look the details up for yourself.  Yes, there are two sides to every story.  The only problem is that this is a story that repeats itself "ad nauseum."
I have used Google Chrome as my default browser and yes it is faster than Internet Explorer but there are a couple of I.E. features that I guess I have grown so accustomed to using that I hate to make the switch permanently.  Mozilla Firefox is a good browser but there is a definite learning curve involved in using it.  I may give it a test drive... who knows?
All I can say for sure is that lately Microsoft had been very disappointing for me.  Whatever.

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