Microsoft’s Own ‘Easy Button’

by Nathaniel Ed on February 8th, 2009 at 8:00 pm EDT - 980 views

Recently Microsoft started implementing it’s latest invention: a ‘Fix it’ button on its self help pages. It isn’t very widespread as of now, but the project is quickly gaining ground, seeing as how it started off with roughly four automatic ‘fix-its’ in December, and now it has grown to about 100 different ‘fix-its.’

To see how it worked, I decided to personally to try out this new feature. I found an easy one for me to try: The Internet Explorer icon is missing from your desktop. Upon arriving on the page, the button stuck out rather quickly. They still have manual fix instructions for Do-It-Yourselfers, but now you can automatically do it.

First of all, I put my IE icon in my recycle bin, then emptied the bin. Next, I clicked on the ‘Fix-It’ button, and a download message appeared. I chose to save the file, and an install wizard came up, so I installed the program that was designed to put an IE icon on my desktop. Next it required me to restart my computer, which I did. Then I noticed that the icon appeared without restarting my computer, but I went ahead and took the advise of the wizard and restarted my computer.

In my opinion, it’s a nice thing to have, but I don’t think that installing a space-cluttering program on my computer, and then requiring me to restart my computer just to put an icon on my computer was really necessary. The icon was already on my computer anyway before the restart! This particular problem was overdone, but in other situations it could be VERY useful. A list of Microsoft ‘Fix-Its’ can be found here by category.

This has a lot of potential, and it could very well be a redeeming factor after the Internet Explorer security issues and after a lot of people lost faith in Microsoft after Vista flubbed. Microsoft also says that it will try to add automatic ‘Fix-Its” to the ever so annoying error reporting messages soon. I personally really hate those. I doubt Microsoft ever reads most of them, since they seem to just fix the issues that many people are experiencing as opposed to issues that only one or two people experience.

As I said, this has a lot of potential, but I’m skeptical. Some things in life are too good to be true, and having the answers to a technical problem handed right to you has always been one of them. My test run worked, but it was simple. Only time will tell if Microsoft will become a more user-friendly company.