9/4/08

Help - Help is not avaliable in this version of Windows!!!

Today at work, I was tinkering with a Vista computer (trying to pin down what can be done about it's excessive RAM utilization), and upon closing all of the open Windows on the computer, I found this notice behind everything.

I loved the wording of the message. "Windows Help Program is no longer included with Windows." - Strategically worded so they don't say "Help isn't included with Windows anymore... we gave up on "helping" with this version of Windows."

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Why couldn't this be phased out anyway? I've even got help file viewers on Linux and Mac OS X computers, it seems a little odd that Microsoft would just stop including it with Windows. What I would have done is include the old help viewer, but start writing all the new help documentation in the new format. Maybe with the next version of Windows, include the old help viewer as an optional addition, but not have it installed by default.

At least Microsoft does include it as a download from their website [.link] - however, there is a total of 6 pages of documentation, over half of which is "known issues after installing WinHlp32.exe" - sigh.

Well, that's my two-cents anyway.

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