I use a lot of Microsoft software. I don't, however, consider myself either a fan or a hater - they're just tools provided by a company, some of which are good, some of which are not so good, and some of which are good but not really worth the money. And, in fairness to them, those tools have generally, very slowly, been getting better.
However, there is one boneheaded decision, made some years ago, that still drives me mental every time I hit it. Specifically, they decided that PCs should be much more like any other appliance, and hide as much of the internals from the user as possible. And, in particular, they should hide all the BIOS feedback during startup.
That's all well and good, until you get to the point where the PC is busy doing something and gives absolutely no feedback as to what that "something" is - I see the HD light blinking on and off, but there's nothing at all on the screen, no response from the input devices... is it busy working on a task that's just taking a long time, or has it crashed and needs me to take action.
For goodness sake, tell us what's going on, and give an indication that progress is actually being made! And I don't mean showing us the spinny dots - all that indicates is that the UI thread is running, but it may well not be connected to anything else. That way, I don't need to either leave a PC that might be stuck sitting indefinitely, nor do I need to take a punt on a power-cycle that might do more harm than good.
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