[LI] Whoever said Outlook was cool ? Far from it...

[RAVIKANT K RAO <ravikant@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Guys,

  *Weep* ... I *just* upgraded from Outlook Express 5 to Outlook 2000 (and
I'm already regretting why I did it ..  in under 15 minutes of the
installation) . I had earlier upgraded OE 4 to OE 5 ... and it had asked
me if I wanted to save my earlier settings , keep older mails , folders ,
use the same mail server settings etc. .( OE 5 automatically configured
itself to read my mails off giasmda and use md3.vsnl.net.in as an MTA and
so on.. ] . ... and When I said yeah , it worked fine... This time , I
expected it to do much the same thing , upgrading from OE 5 to OE 2K ...
and When I run Outlook Express 2000 , the damn thing said , "Outlook has
detected Conflicts etc .. Restart windows right away?! (Recommended) " ...
So I obviously did what was recommended ... and voila ... lo behold ....
It had deleted all of my 250 odd stored emails saved under some 20 odd
folders , some 80 or so contacts [ email addresses ... ] ... *weep* ...
I'm ready just now to murder someone ... GRRR ...And not once did I
encounter a warning message or anything ... not even a hint that I was
going to lose all my stuff. If it had told me before it started off that I
would lose stuff , I wouldn't have even upgraded.... *sigh*.... And all
these I realize after restarting windows 3 times in 5 minutes.. and
Watching a box that goes like this ...
.  " Ms Office / Windows Installer is optimizing your system for
superlative performance " for some 20 whole minutes.. [ I'm running a
Celeron 300 A at that ! - Imagine how much time it would take on a 486 ??
] 

  My point is this , As far as I know .. I'm not exactly the *dumbest* of
comp users... and It still managed to con me into losing all my mails/info
etc... without the *slightest* hint .... so whoever said MS makes life
easier , makes things more 'User Friendly' ... etc etc ???? It only made
my life worse and far more complex.

  I cant believe that a guy who makes Version 1.x Cannot upgrade that
version to 2.x by himself .... 

  I've lost email addresses that I cant possibly ever recover...something
like XYZ.MADRAS@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ... Of course I also
wonder why people stick to such weird email addresses ... (?)

  I was contemplating if I should leave an active Windows Partition at all
... and I'm *SURE* I'm kicking Win 98 out in less than a week's time and
switching full time to Linux.

  [ The main reason I was still having an active win partition was that I
had all these mails saved .. things like pictures that were emailed to me
... but never uploaded to any www site... and It would be too much of a
pain to kick out all those and switch full time to Linux ... so I had this
running by the side...and well , the rest is history ]

  Here's my tip ... By default assume that *ANYTHING* even Faintly related
to MS is going to mess up your box before you do an installation / up
gradation ... and take backups ... 


  And other interesting that I saw Live was:

   * While one can Install Linux on a Machine with 2 Megs of RAM [ Maybe
even less , I don't know ... (Still new to Linux :-( ) ] ... Windows 2000
3rd Beta will *NOT* install on a machine which has 16 megs of RAM ... it
wants a minimum of 32 Megs... [ One of these Anti MS Sites' strong point
was infact that With every up gradation in some s/w that MS makes... one
is *FORCED* to upgrade his hardware ... ] ... Since even the 3rd Beta does
not install on a 16 meg RAM machine ... I don't suppose they would have
treated this as a bug and fixed it in Windows 2000 Full Version itself.

  Sorry if I'm boring you with an excessively long e-mail with
redundancy... but you might probably understand how obscenely stoopid it
is to lose things that you've collected over some 1 year's time in a
matter of 15 minutes for no fault of yours ,... :-(

  Amen

- A *REALLY* annoyed *EX* - Outlook user.

---
ravikant@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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