If you just type “microsoft.com”, “windowsupdate.com” or any other domain+tld, you go to bing because Microsoft things the URL address bar is a search engine query bar. Instead you will have to type out “http://www.windowsupdate.com/”. Apparently Microsoft thinks you’re the kind of internet moron that likes to type the entire URL including the protocol and www subdomain. I’m sure every techi knows what I’m talking about. All techies have those “special” friends that like to dictate letter by letter “h, t, t, p, colon, slash, slash, w, w, w, dot, etc…” instead of just saying the domain and tld (ie. google.com). I usually just ignore people until I hear them say the first “dot”.

I get dedicated IP addresses where I live. This is great compared with sitting behind a NAT unless you’re installing windows. As soon as it’s installed and you plug in the ethernet cable you have anywhere from 5 seconds to 5 minutes before your computer is compromised and you are required to re-install. This means you must start updating VERY QUICKLY. I was doing such a re-install with keyboard only. Navigating was a bit slow, but what really ticked me off was trying to go to “windowsupdate.com” and getting the Bing page with a million links to tab through to find the proper link to the updates. Of course by the time i found it, i got a 404 trying to reach it. I opened up the command line and, ran netstat -n and saw I was already compromised. There were thousands of connections open trying to compromise other machines. The backdoor that was installed was blocking the windows update site. If Microsoft and Bing hadn’t wasted my time maybe my windows update would have saved me from having to re-install AGAIN… Re-installs are sure fun!

I do hope everyone involved with this project at Microsoft dies of some kind of really painful slow cancer. Something that makes you bleed out of your ass would do.

Here is what I recommend to get around this crap:

1. After installing Picasa launch it and pick the second option (Desktop/My Documents/My Photos).

2. Go to Tools -> Folder Management.

3. A new window should be open. In that window you should see a list-box titled “Watched Folders”. Click on each watched folder and then “Remove from Picasa”.

4. After doing this for each folder press “OK”.

5. Now you should have a nice and clean Picasa install! Drop in the folders you want to index and enjoy.

Maybe Google will stop assuming you’re an idiot at some point?