This morning, I’ve now spent 30 minutes googling, testing, and troubleshooting for a guy who was having trouble getting outlook to talk to our outbound mail server. I suggested various things, of course asked for more information, and while waiting for responses, went off to see if others had seen this issue. Of course, every conceivable issue has been seen with outlook I guess.
Anyway, about 5 minutes ago, the guy emailed me to tell me that everything is fine. It turned out that his Norton Anti-Virus was the cause of the problem.
Great. 30 minutes wasted because M$ can’t figure out how to put together an OS that doesn’t require a third party application to keep it from blowing up. The aisles at compUSA and Fry’s are lined with boxes of software to clean up the windows registry, clean up unused files, debuggify, de-infect, de-spam, etc. Consumers spend millions per year (at least!) trying to get Microsoft Windows to work *as advertised*. This is a sad state of affairs.
For home use: if you’re not technical, go get a Mac. If you are technical, run Linux. You’ll be better off.