Ok, here is my typical morning -->

Walk in, sit down with my coffee and check the backups from the night before only to find that, yet again, they have hung and not completed due to an RPC error between the client software and the backup server software, an error which is acknowledged by the software vendor, and which does in fact have a patch, but a patch has not done crap to alleviate the issue.

I go on the internet to find I have no connectivity. I look into the issue and fine that the proxy server has stopped accepting connections. I try to make an RDP connection to the server to see what is going on, but it appears that opening 2 applications (one of which is My Computer) at the same time is too much and my Winblows XP box stops responding. I reboot and wait and my computer does not restart (it hangs at applying computer settings), so I reboot it a second time become impatient and sit down at my assistant's computer. Now when I log into my assistants's computer his hangs as well and finally becomes unresponsive. I go back to my computer which has finally started.

I log into the proxy server and find no events or errors in the event viewer, (surely an event must have occurred?!?). I run performance montors against the box to see that it has no bottlenecks at all (memory, bandwidth, processor, etc). Surely something must be going worng?!?! But, alas, nothing. All services are running. No memeory or proc issues. Disk read/writes are normal, not a lot of page activity. No network issues. So I reboot the server and the issue goes away.

I set up to continue monitoring with permon, but perfmon stops responding and must be killed with an "end task." In fact, have to do this three times before I can set up the apporpriate counters. Now, because I do not trust that perfmon is actually working properly, I go to check to see that my log file is in fact being created in "c:\perflogs." However, opening "My Computer" crashes windows explorer five times in a row before I can actually get into my C: drive by anything but the command prompt.

By this time, my coffee is cold, my hemerriod and ulcer are bleeding profusely and I want a new profession. Why has Windows taken my love of computer and sh*t all over it.

I would like to say that maybe I am doing somethnig wrong, but I can't believe this to be the case. I have been working with Winblows for about 6 years and it has taken years off my life! What is the life expentancy of a Windows technician anyway? Why does nothing run as advertised? Why is everything from Microsoft or written to run on Microsoft platforms broken "Out of the Box?" I could go on and on about all the bugs and problems I have found in my years of working with M$ products that Microsoft admits are bugs yet has no fixes for. And these are bugs with basic functionality of some of their upper-tire, Enterprise-class products (Exchange Enterprise, MS Clustering Services, Terminal Services, SQL Enterprise, etc)!

I just don't get it. If I bought a TV and went home and had to troubleshoot the thing to get channel 7, or if I had to install patches to get my toaster to toast my bread, wouldn't this be unacceptable?

Sorry for the long rant this morning. I had to get this off my chest. But God how I hate you Microsoft! You truely do suck.