One of the developers of Windows XP is criminally insane

Windows XP is so bad that I can only assume one or more of the developers are insane. Why else would they put so much effort into destroying something that works? Microsoft should offer a free upgrade from Windows XP back to Windows 2000.

I converted one of my frequently used Windows 2000 machines to Windows XP 64 for two reasons. The machine has 8 GB of memory and Windows 2000 uses only 4 GB. Some hardware suppliers have stopped supplying drivers for Windows 2000. I regret the change. After many months of trying to fix things in Windows XP, XP is still little almost unusable.

The lastest ugly Microsoft wart is the search function in Windows XP. Search used to work in Windows 2000. You could search for a file by name or based on text in the file. In XP, you cannot search for a file based on text in the file. Microsoft deliberately made the feature faulty so you cannot use use it for anything.

Why would Microsoft treat their customers like garbage? The only viable explanation is that Microsoft wanted to fake a performance improvement.

The search function works at the speed of your disks. You cannot make it faster by software tricks. You have to use faster disks. That technical limitation did not stop Microsoft.

First they disabled the search for most file types. Yeah, they cheated by skipping most of your files. They pretended their search is faster by not actually searching. You can never search for your file because the search does not search.

Next they decided a text search should not search for text. Instead each file type would have a different type of search with many of the searches skipping much of the text. Should you be lucky and find the file you want is one that Microsoft will search, you might still find Microsoft looks at only some of the text and skips the bit you search for.

After all that stupidity or criminally destructive behaviour or insanity, choose your own terminology, Microsoft struck a third blow against the search. You cannot search for a text string. Their text string search refuses to find text. Their text search does not search for text. Instead their text search will only look for a word within a limited range of white space and punctuation.

The search is now completely useless for anything outside a very simple file name search.

Microsoft describe a very long laborious way of fixing a tiny part of the problem in support.microsoft.com/kb/309173. All the Microsoft recommendation does is give you a way to decrease the range of files skipped by the search. The change does not fix the text search problem, leaving the search completely useless.

When will I dump my last Microsoft Windows machine? I have just one left. There is only one application on the machine that requires Windows and I use that application only once per week for a few minutes.

At one stage I had 20 licences for Microsoft Windows desktops and servers. I used Microsoft Windows Server on my desktop machines for a while because that was the only way to make Windows work on a full power desktop workstation. Now I dump the Windows disks in the bin whenever I find them. Linux is a 99% replacement and getting better with every release.

Why would anybody ever buy an operating system from Microsoft when Microsoft work so hard to make every version of Windows worse than the one before?