Searching for signs of intelligent life.

Well my new job requires me to dive back into the world of Microsoft. I haven't used Windows since 98SE. At the time I thought that stability aside, it was a pretty good operating system. I would have thought that things would be much better now. What I find, however, is that Microsoft has taken tasks that I once knew how to do and made them "simplified". There are setup wizards everywhere. They ask you a few questions and then change undeclared settings. These are setting that I used to know how to change myself. Now I have to learn how to get Windows to make the decisions I need.

Windows is full of "helpful new features" that a competent computer user will spend hours trying to disable or circumvent, but the issue that actually spawned this rant is not at all new to the MS world.

I have a 250 Gigabyte hard drive in my computer. Why do I need to keep my Windows CD beside me at all times?!?!?! I didn't setup this machine! It was issued to me by the IT guy. He has all the CDs, and he doesn't come in until after noon. He did however copy the CD to C:\I386\, but this stupid popup won't let me navigate to that path. It wants the original CD.

What would you expect from an operating system that requires me to copy this blog post and paste it into Microsoft Word in order to spell check it?

(I don't have a "Computers" category on my blog, so should I put this in "Apple")