Micro$oft

I've spent a lot of the past 24 hours going through reformat hell, and otherwise being ridiculously unproductive. I came home from shopping yesterday afternoon to find my CD and DVD drives not working because of some driver issue with Windows. However, obviously you cannot run set-up from a CD if neither CD-Drive is working properly. I managed to go back to a restore point earlier in the week and have the drives work again, but in the process I found a whole other pile of crap going on in Windows that I was sick of trying to fix, so decided it was time to reformat. I backed up all my important documents and pictures to another drive, and went for it. The whole thing went relatively smoothly, I cut and pasted my documents back into the main drive, and kept going with my updates and installing software, only to somehow get a virus/spyware thing 10 minutes later opening windows all over the place. In my pissed off haste, I immediately formatted, forgetting to backup the documents the second time around, losing, so I thought for most of the night, 5 years worth of my relevent shit. I gave up, and came back to it this morning remembering that those files had been deleted, but not formatted off of the second drive, and went in search of a program that would look at the remnant files and maybe bring em back. I got lucky with the first program I found. I had to sit and ignore a bunch of read errors on sectors I assume got overwritten, but I got most of my stuff back. And now a few hours later I'm almost done setting up the rest of my software, and even more disappointed by the quality of Micro$oft products...Firefox, Thunderbird, and Miranda Instant Messenger for all! (see sidebar)