Microsoft Account Troubleshooter: not updated since Oct. 2013

Brass Contributor

Hi! I downloaded today (2020-07-14) the tool ( microsoftaccounts.diagcab ) and opened it with 7-zip. The files there are from Oct. 2013. It means that the tool might not know about changes to account authentication. Therefore, it may report wrong conclusions/detections.

 

I may be wrong but it seems to me that the tool needs some updating.

 

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5 Replies

Hello @sandro,

 

I would recommend you to submit your findings via Feedback hub, so it gets addressed by the correct engineering team. Hopefully we have an updated version of the troubleshooter soon :)

 

Good luck!

Hello @Kapil Arya ,

 

Thanks for you remark!

 

I have already sent it to Feedback Hub - in fact, before posting here.

 

However, I am not much confident on Feedback Hub. This is based on my personal experience with it.

 

Anyway, I am not alone:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10s-feedback-hub-a-forum-for-political-troll...

 

Bye!

@sandroInteresting. I seem to be coming across that problem more and more frequently and I was starting to worry it was just me. In the past week alone, while seeking and researching material, files, apps, tools, etc., that I believed to be fairly current, I was surprised to find that many of the places I ended up that allegedly had what I was seeking had tools, versions, etc., from as far back as 2012 and many were in the 2013 - 2016 range. I even stumbled across some tools that I had been told were current that were designed for Windows 7! What's going on? I can't believe new versions aren't coming out, and I know they must, but when some are simply impossible to locate unless they're 5-10+ years old, well like I said, you start wondering about your intellectual and technical abilities...

Hello @tangledscott,

As you might guess, my computers were not synchronizing. I have employed the diagnostics tool to check whether the problem was on my side. To cut a long story short, the results sounded a bit awkward. Either Microsoft data centres were permanently off or even overloaded all the time - or the tool itself was brain-damaged. Well, you have seen my discovery by yourself.

My background comes from the European way to build highly dependable rail transport solutions - the CENELEC Standards. The solution development life cycle become more rigorous as the amount of damage raises. At its highest level (SIL 4) the probability of occurrence of a Safety-related failure shall be inferior to 0,000000000001 = 10^(-12) throughout the entire operational life of the function. I know this is not the case here. My point is that even the humblest tool in any Safety-related function path shall abide by a process whose strictness is proporcional to its damage. Nothing is left behind. Nothing is forgotten.

Now coming back to the Microsoft Account Troubleshooter. Everything about Windows is huge. I believe that thousands of Microsoft account users are somehow directed to this support tool every single day. They do trust this tool. And it is misleading. There is indeed a damage to the overall trust on Microsoft solutions. And this means money. Money which is been eroded.

Furthermore, I have paid for my licence. I have paid for an upgrade to my licence. I have paid to get a licence to my Windows virtual machine. I have paid for a full licence of an old (but useful) Vista machine. Four licences at my own expenses. 

It is high time for Microsoft to get some inspiration from the high-dependability industry and analyse its operation from a damage-to-user standpoint. They will see that some appraised new features will not embark in the first trains. And others were lost, forgotten at the yard.