Somehow, it has become the industry standard. Somehow, nobody can challenge it. Somehow, they are immune from prosecution. Some day, they will get what they deserve.

Using Windows is a truly bizarre experience. First of all, there is the boot period. Will it boot correctly? Will it tell you off for not shutting down properly? Is it going to trash your harddisk? Will it take much longer? All this doubt brings a certain type of (restricted) illation when Windows pops up at you, yet also disgust that you should have all this doubt.
Then of course, there is running applications. Are they going to save properly? Where you told them to? Are they about to crash and lose your work? Are you going to have enough memory? Again you get pangs of excitement that it is still working, yet fear that it may not. And every now and then, it will throw up a little gem that you just can't help laughing at.

This is one of said gems. Now I don't know about you, but I and most operating systems consider the successful completion of a task to be exactly that - a success. But obviously to Windows, something being done well, how the user wanted and successfully is something alien! These, by the way, are true errors thrown up by Windows at some point. If you have any crazy messages, a screengrab would be grataful at captain.kumquat@virgin.net. To take a grab of your desktop, simply press the "Print Screen" key then go into MSPaint (or similar) and select "Paste" from the edit menu. You are then free to save this image.

This requester is slightly confusing - how are you supposed to click OK without a mouse?

This is a little gem courtesy of Notepad. Just in case you hadn't noticed that you didn't type any text, it thoughtfully informs you when you come to save. But what, I ask you Mr. Notepad, if I want a file that contains no text? A blank file if you will, please.

And finally we have perhaps the most bizarre of all. You don't need to know a great deal about computers to realise that deleting something will remove it from the disk, thereby freeing space on it.Why-oh-why then does this error appear when attempting to delete something from a nearly-fully harddisk? For one thing, deleting files frees disk space which is what the user wanted and secondly, how is the user supposed to free disk space if to be able to delete will require the freeing of disk space which in turn requires freeing of diskspace which in turn requires freeing of diskspace which in turn requires freeing of diskspace which in turn requires freeing of diskspace which in turn requires freeing of diskspace?

These little gems came my way courtesy of a certain Mr Tickle. First of all we have a hidden options menu, altough exactly how to get it wasn't specified. It could be in a similar vein as an easter egg. These are little hidden 'features' which Microsoft are renowned for putting in their programs. Perhaps the most famous is the flight sim hidden in Excel 97. I haven't really got space to go into details here as to how to get it, but needless to say there are plenty of sites with instructions on how to get easter eggs. I recommend an Altavista search for "easter eggs". Secondly is our old chum, the Office Paper Clip. How many times has he popped up offering help, only for you to swear at him? I've lost count. Office allows you to load in new characters, such as the cat, but this is another add-on that was slyly released by some unknown source which even changed the questions it asks.

This one found its way to me via Paul Cundle (who'll love me for mentioning his name). Completely genuine, try it for yourself: Run Word. Set language to English (American). Type "Unable to follow instructions" (without quotes). Highlight whole sentence, and run thesaurus (shift f7). As Paul himself said: ":) We always knew Billy Boy had a secret."

Maybe it only seems this way.

---