Microsoft launches "Fix It" | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft launches "Fix It"

fixitcenter.support.microsoft.com

20 pointsjaxc21 comments

Can someone explain in simple terms what this actually is? The page is so vague and markety I'm really confused.

From what I can grok. You go around browsing some help documents on the MS website. On some of the documents, there is a "Fix it" button. You click it, and it basically automates what's in the help document.

You just did a better job than Microsoft's copy writers, and they didn't even pay you.

This has been a part of the MS knowledge base for at least one year. Why is this "news" now?

http://blogs.technet.com/fixit4me/archive/2008/11/19/welcome...

No magic at all... I had my "monthly bluescreen of death" but the "Fixit tool" did not recognize the error. It just told me about a crashing Internet Explorer. This is interesting because I never used my Internet explorer.

Unfortunately my system is running smoothly for the rest, so I can't evaluate the ability of the Automated troubleshooters. 2 hours of usage and not impressed so far.

FWIW - many programs use IE's layout engine for their display functionality. I don't know if it does any more, but Quickbooks used to. The only way I found this out is when I turned off images in IE Quickbooks failed to display about half of its UI.

Honestly, this is a great idea for most users, although how MS hopes to pull it off is a mystery, their cryptic error messages are rarely covered at all on their official sites...wouldn't it seem reasonable that the developer that raised the error would be responsible for at least making some somewhat informational note about it? And now, they are intending to actually fix it, automatically???? lol

executing binary from a non-secured page seems like a no brainer.

If it was a secure page it would be a-okay, right?

At least you would know who it's from. Otherwise anyone could phish you or MITM and send you any executable they want.

You still know who it's from, just look at the signature: http://i.imgur.com/Icz56.png

If the https would not redirect you to the http, it would at the very least be marginally(!) better...

what sort of magic is this?

It seems terrible to me that users should even need tools like this. Why should they have to care about this stuff? Gone are the days when every computer user is a hobbyist.

I think those days ended a long time ago. When did computers become mainstream? the 90's? 80s? Gone are also the days of grunge and being able to perform your own car maintenance. Also gone are the days of subsistence farming. oh well. Adapt or die.

My hobby is developing for computers but my hobby isn't maintaining them.

It's not that I can't, I just don't enjoy it. I find it a chore like washing dishes. I'd rather have a dishwasher to do all that stuff so I have the time to do what I enjoy.

There's always iPad.

This has to be at least an incremental improvement. MSDN's knowledge base has the worst case of linkrot I can think of on the internet.

I'm glad I'll never have to run this.

Is it "install Linux"?

a good start for users who dont know anything and wont spend hours of searching on technical blogs.

simplifying is always the best way to handle with a large front of customer's.

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