IT WAS MEEEEEE!!!

Amendum to yesterday’s post:

Mpeg2dx.dll : It was MEEEEEEEE!!!

Yep, it turned out that the rotten file causing oblivion to crash was a dll file that came with a codec pack I recently installed. Now I can get back to Oblivion!

I’m still slightly ticked off, however.

You see, if this problem has occurred a couple of years ago, back when Microsoft didn’t assume that all their users are complete morons, I could have fixed this problem in about 15 minutes…instead of the 6 hours+ it took me to track down.

You see, back in the day, when there was an error, you used to get an actual error message.

Today you get that awfully patronizing:

“(Insert Program Title here) has encountered a problem and has had to close. Any information you were working on may have been lost. Would you like to tell Microsoft about this problem?”

Well, one, it’s bloody obvious that my program has ‘encountered an error and had to close’, I half-figured that out myself when it stopped running and threw me back to the desktop.

Two, I KNOW the ‘information I was working on may have been lost’, you see, I didn’t get a chance to save because my program fell over.

Three, and this is the part that really ticks me off “Would you like to tell Microsoft about this problem.”

Why? What are they going to do? Send someone to my house to fix it? Have a crack team of highly-trained special forces programmers work night and day to make my game work?

No, it’s going to go into a stack with the millions of other error reports that no-one is ever going to look at.

Here’s what that error message should read like:

“Your program has encountered an error and has had to close. You’re pretty much screwed if it was important. Now, we understand that you’re a moron who has trouble finding his own backside without both hands and a map, so we’re not actually going to tell you what went wrong, because let’s face it, you wouldn’t understand anyway. Instead, I’m offering to send the actual error report to Microsoft, where everyone is bright, intelligent and much better than you.”

If only…If I’d been able to see a copy of the error report, it would have told me what files where conflicting.

Like I said, a 15 second fix transformed into a 6 hour frustrationathon (It’s a word), all because Microsoft thinks everyone’s too stupid to understand a bloody error message.

(On the upside, my Oblivion character just got to level 10, and became master of the Fighter’s Guild….Shit hot.)