Why Microsoft sucks

Don't get me wrong, I own a 360 and love it, and almost all of my home systems run on some version of Windows or other. But sometimes, they do things that just makes me want to beat someone with my laptop.

Someone suggested to me that I install Visual Web Developer Express, a small IDE for performing some web dev tasks that is faster than dealing with Visual Studio 2008. Ok, seems reasonable. I download the installer and run it. It errors out, saying that Visual Studio needs to update first. It doesn't give me any links to follow to perform the update, so I just google Microsoft Update (in IE, since I bet it won't like Firefox), find the link, and go. After waiting two minutes, the site finally loads, and says I should use Windows Update from the Start Menu instead of the web. It then launches Windows Update for me, which claims I'm up to date. But since I don't want to update Windows, but Visual Studio, this probably isn't where I need to be anyway.

So I launch Visual Studio, and try to use it's update feature. It launches Firefox (my default browser), and then redirects to an error page saying that, surprise, this site only works with IE. So I pull the URL from Firefox's history, and try again in IE. It takes two minutes to load...and then takes me back to the same page I was at earlier, saying to use Windows Update. Ok. I go back to Windows Update and tell it to check for updates anyway, even if it thinks I'm up to date. It does, then comes back and says Windows Update needs to be updated so that it can check for updates...

Lo and behold, my system finally seems to be updating, though I've no idea if any of the updates is the update needed in order to install Visual Web Developer Express. It may be faster than Visual Studio 2008, but if I had just stuck with that, I would have been working half an hour ago.