Bill Gates You Should Be ASHAMED.....

....taking my money, making your products almost indispensable and then fobbing me off when I have a problem. Well actually it's not just me, there are hundreds if not thousands of other people around the globe with exactly the same problem as me and Microsoft can't be bothered to fix it.

I'll start at the beginning. I have a Dell Desktop - over 4 years old now and a real workhorse, not the fastest machine and no fancy sound or graphics but it has worked all day every day for the past 4 years and I don't think you can ask more than that. But recently my USB ports have only worked intermittently - some days I can upload photos from the Camera and some days I can't, the Memory Stick sometimes works in the ports on the front of the machine and other days it will only work in the ones on the rear. Some days the Scanner won't start, some days the Colour Printer and on some glorious days NOTHING WORKS AT ALL.

I have tried every possible combination of equipment and ports and every combination of having things plugged in at Boot Up and plugged in after Booting up - the result? never the same on two consecutive days. I Googled to see if anyone else had the same problem....
Ooh look, lots of people have the same problem!! What did they do to fix it?

Tried tweaking the Registry, Un-installing and Re-installing Drivers etc etc and nothing worked. So I went to the Microsoft site and looked for their answer.
Guess what they say? Along the lines of 'We are aware that Users are experiencing intermittent problems with USB ports' BUT as the problem is intermittent and it doesn't affect everybody's machine in the whole wide world and because we're unlikely to get sued by anybody - WE'RE GOING TO DO NOTHING ABOUT IT.

I've bought a new laptop so I've got backup now but that brings it's own problems - it runs Vista and I didn't want to swap over and some of my favourite free utilities - AVG, ZoneAlarm etc are rumoured not to work properly under Vista. I will also have to look at a Wireless Network for the house as we only have one phone line. No time to knit this week - too busy cursing Bill.....