[theevilsharpie]

In a past life, I was a system administrator for Windows-based computer systems. While I'm not in that world anymore, I do dip my toes into it occasionally to help out acquaintances that still are, and it is both mind-boggling and discouraging how difficult it is to find useful information when troubleshooting a problem with software in Microsoft's ecosystem.

If it's not log messages that are somehow simultaneously overly verbose while lacking any actionable diagnostic information, then it's useless resources like https://answers.microsoft.com that pollute search results with junk, or people in forums trying random things and then describing something as a solution because whatever problem they were having coincidentally stopped at the same time. And when you do actually find a clear solution to your problem, it's a combination of registry settings, commands, and similar that you would have never been able to intuit on your own, and would never generalize to anything else.

I truly feel for this generation of Windows sysadmins. It wasn't always this bad.

[JohnFen]

The availability of great documentation and good support used to be a strength of Microsoft, but they apparently decided they didn't need that strength.

For my part, I have answers.microsoft.com downranked in my Kagi searching because an overwhelming majority of the time it's either worthless or wrong.

[BizarroLand]

I just block it entirely with uBlacklist. I don't think I have ever received 1 useful piece of information on that entire site.