When will Microsoft not be so stupid?

So, I just bought a new laptop. Given the nature of what I do, I had to get a Windows Vista machine. I wish more of my clients used a Mac so that I could do more development on my Mac.

Maybe one day.

I had it installed with Vista Ultimate because it doesn't make sense to me to intentionally get a version of an operating system that is missing features. I have spent about seven (7) hours getting it all set up. I had to turn off various security features (like User Account Control and prevention of non-digitally signed drivers) and work through installation problems just to get it all to finally work for me.

I then needed to set up my Exchange account and Google IMAP accounts. For those of you who have ever set up Outlook, you know that you can't set up Exchange from within Outlook. If you try, you get this error:

Notice that it indicates that you should go to the Control Panel and open the Mail icon.

So, here are the icons that are around what should be the Mail icon.

Do you notice something missing?

Yes, the Mail icon is conspicuously absent.

So, I did some checking on Google. I tried everything that I could think of. I went to Microsoft's site. I found some people that had a similar problem in XP and the recommendation was varied from reinstalling Windows Mail and Internet Explorer to reinstalling the entire system. I spent a couple of hours on this problem alone.

Not having the Mail icon in the control panel really caused a problem. Finally, I broke down. I contacted technical support for my new laptop.

The response was, "Microsoft has removed that feature from the Control Panel in Vista." Huh? How does that make sense? How do I manage email accounts and email data files if the icon they say to use simply does not exist.

Oh, the idiots over at Microsoft must have had a few meetings to discuss how much more complicated can they can make this for their customers. And they wonder why Vista has met with such adoption problems.

As I indicated to tech support that I need to manage my email accounts through this control panel, the tech support guy decided to start doing some research for me. I waited for about 15 minutes. He was still researching... now with his supervisor.

No luck.

Then, I remembered that when I was running Windows 2000 in 1999, in order to manage the email accounts, I had to right-click on the Outlook Icon. I thought I should give it a try. Viola... it worked.

So, Microsoft... not so smart. Corey Smith... only slightly smarter for taking two hours to figure it out. But, I guess I shouldn't feel too bad when every forum I went to didn't know the answer either. At least you now know and don't have to waste your evening like I did.