Ladies and gentlemen, with the help of my half-bright assistant, Windows XP, I will now perform the wondrous feat of prestidigitation I call "The Remote Blue Screen of Death!" Watch carefully as I click Internet Explorer's Print button on this brand-new Windows XP computer....

Presto! Change-o! Now follow the ethernet cables over to this machine running Microsoft's "exceptionally stable" Windows 2000, the PC that's actually hooked up to the printer. Yes, ladies and gents: a screen full of Mood Indigo and puzzling hex code. That baby is locked up tighter than Bill Gates at an antitrust deposition!

Want to see that trick again? It's totally repeatable. Blame it on the Redmond, Washington, elves who work at the campus I call the Bug Factory. The error arises because my Hewlett-Packard printer's Windows XP driver (Microsoft-certified and included in the operating system's package) lacks its predecessors' ability to print over a network without extra hardware. That shouldn't make the Win 2000 PC crash, but it does. And XP uses the driver without warning me of the consequences.

The More Things Change...

HP says it will supply a fix someday, but wasn't XP supposed to be built on the Win 2000 platform? Why can't I just use the Win 2000 drivers? Hey, if it doesn't involve change for the sake of change, it wouldn't be Microsoft. And the problem isn't just that the bugs exist, it's also that the OS and its help system keep you from figuring out how to get around them.

Remember Zenith's old slogan, "The quality goes in before the name goes on"? At the Bug Factory, it's the other way around. Boot up a brand-new XP machine, click your way to Windows Update, and you'll find a security-related "Critical Update" ready for you to install, along with other fixes. It's as if Zenith had supplied every TV with a note asking you to go back to the store and get channel and volume knobs that actually worked.

XP's updates, I thought, were supposed to be more or less automatic. And that's the way my PC seemed to be set up. But it wasn't until a few days after I began using it that a dialog balloon offered to automate the process. Why did it wait so long to suggest this? Ask the Bug Factory.

Besides, Windows Update doesn't go far enough. When I checked it on November 18, its patches stopped at October 25, omitting the "critical" Internet Explorer patch (for a nasty problem involving compromised cookies) that came out on November 12. Days passed before the "automatic" updater offered a fix.

And why, when I fiddle with IE's privacy options, do some Web sites stop working? It's often because what IE deems "third-party" sites are really differently addressed versions of the one I'm on. But can you tell the "medium" level of privacy, which (italics mine) "Restricts first-party cookies that use personally identifiable information without your implicit consent," from the "medium high" level, which "Blocks first-party cookies that use personally identifiable information without your implicit consent"? If so, a law career awaits. If not, don't bother checking the help system.

What's most depressing about XP is how much hasn't changed. Even though it recognized my monitor, it didn't bother improving the display's refresh rate from an eyeball-busting 60 Hz. You might blame that on a video-driver bug, but the solution is tough to find, because it hides behind a daunting "Advanced" button.

And for that the blame rests squarely on the Bug Factory.

• See more like this:
• Windows,
• Windows XP,
• Microsoft,
• bugs,
• printer,
• drivers,
• upgrade,
• update