Has anyone any experience of Microsoft support? I submitted a problem yesterday and I'm waiting a (proper) response.


The problem is driving me insane and I really need it working! I mean - what the hell kind of reply is "[admin work qTrack]"?

Not sure... I have only contacted them a couple of times by phone and both times things were worked out pretty quickly.

I wonder if it's some kind of internal routing code to pass it on to another dept?

The problem is that usually the big companies outsource their support, so you're probably not actually speaking to Microsoft rather just a droid with access to the internal (rather than the public) version of the technet system.

I had a problem resolved quite well a year or so ago and if I remember correctly the solution came back with some sample javascript to help.

If you don't like the answer, then go back to them, you'll either get a resolution of they'll loose the call

It's driving me nuts!

A guy emailed me back saying he understands the issue, has replicated it where he is and is working on a workaround or getting me info on how to deal with the problem. This was on the 14th so I emailed back today and he apologised for taking so long and said he'd get back to me soon.

I hope it gets resolved soon, the problem is really getting on my nerves!

And to top it all I'm having major issues installing Visual Studio 2005 Professional on my laptop, it goes to the "insert disk 2" and when I insert the second disk I get the blue screen of death. I suspect it's to do with the SQL 2005 installation on disk 2 but there's no error in the event log or other information easily to hand.

Oh - and my issue above, it's confirmed as a bug. How bad is this release from Microsoft? I've never seen something so buggy from them. (I'm not particularly a Microsoft hater and I've never really encountered any show-stopping problems like these before.)

I've copied all files onto my hard disk and running a minimal install.

Erm, no you won't find it there. It's on Disk 2 you f***ing muppet! No "Browse" function, either. This product was very rushed.

Very strange. I usually copy cd's to the drive and install from the hard drive so that if it needs the files in future I dont need to go find them all.

Yeah, Office 2000 taught me that lesson!

I just find it strange that even developers as low down the chains as me are filing bug reports. Never had to do that before, most problems I encounter have documentation / others with the same problem online.

Will, did you ever get a quality solution from Microsoft?

Hi Matt. The guy I spoke to clearly knew what he was doing and didn't seem to want to palm me off with an inaccurate or incomplete response.

He quickly reproduced the error and queried it against the .Net framework team responsible. When a response was received he passed on the information to me and tried to find a workaround - the workaround was to not use the .Net Framework's web browser control but to use the IE dlls myself to render HTML on the application's form.

He said the problem had been elevated and submitted a bug report to be fixed in the next service pack.

In the end, although the response was slow (over 2 weeks, I think) it was worth waiting for. The problem itself, however, should not have been there in the first place - it seems a little basic to have been overlooked.

Thanks Will, it's good to hear a success story (in the end)! It's good to hear that Microsoft put in genuine effort to help you solve the problem.