This weekend I was visiting my sister and brother in law. They are the proud owners of a new laptop that came with Microsoft Windows Vista. They have two children as well and they all use the computer. They were unable to figure out why one of the websites that the children visit was no longer working and had not been for some time. As well, the kids had several programs popping up when they logged in and were unable to remove them.

The website problem turned out to be the “Internet Protection feature” of Internet explorer. I spent about an hour trying to ‘fix’ it so that this children’s site was allowed to function. No luck. I dove deeper and deeper into the system settings, registry, internet add-ons, and account permissions. No use. There was was no easy way to override it, except to turn off the Internet Protection feature. Adding the website didn’t work, adding the IP addresses and other sites it contacted didn’t work. According to the error logs, Microsoft has decided that the flash software is doing some system call ‘incorrectly’ or in a non-secure way and therefore is blocked. No way to override it. Where does Microsoft get off telling people what they can and can’t do with their computers? More to the point, turning off the Internet Protection feature was the only way to permit the site to run. All these new cool security features and in order to get to a single site I know is safe, I need to turn off all the security for all sites — stupid design.

Stopping all the other software starting when the user logs in was another large task. None of the programs started in the startup folder. My sister-in-law didn’t even know a startup folder existed. Not that it would have helped even if she did know how to get to it. All the programs started via the registry. I had to enter the registry to disable the software from starting up.

This whole process took me over an hour and most would say I know what I am doing. How is a general home user that is not technical suppose to work with this? Even if you are technical, why would you put someone through this just to get to a website? Did anyone at Microsoft even stop to consider this? Microsoft needs to re-think both system design and security. I would not hire the people that designed this. They obviously need much more education and training.