I found a bug in windows Vista SP1, but now I have a problem – there is no way to report it. Apparently Microsoft is so audacious as to think their beta testers tried all possible input combinations. It’s just a bad philosophy, and the reason why Windows will eventually fail. Anyway, in the hope that maybe placing this online will accomplish something, here is my bug.

I tried to copy my iTunes library to a fat32 formatted external hard drive. I dragged and dropped, and Windows copied for a while and completed, but threw no errors.

When I tried to access it the next day, a good half of the library was missing!

What appears to have happened is that Vista hit an artist with an “international” character (just an accent over an e) and stopped copying. No complaints, no errors, no dialogs (lord knows Microsoft knows how to create dialogs).

So now I have no way of knowing what is getting skipped when I copy files. I think I may try using the command line xcopy, but seriously, this is ridiculous.

EDIT:

Found another bug.

I had a folder called “pictures”. I renamed this to “pictures_old” so that I could copy in a folder of the same name without merging them. What does Windows do? It says “a folder named pictures_old already exists, to I want to merge?” WTF??!? I had to copy the pictures to a totally different location.

Windows sucks. I hope Apple decides to let Mac OS X run on any PC, because they would easily destroy Microsoft. That or linux developers get their heads out of their respective butts and embrace standards in user interface design.