The most stupid MS Windows message ever

[rogermatthews]

and you get some pretty stupid messages when trying to get help with MS products

I've been running Windows 7 64bit for some months without problem (well ...ish!) But today I had a problem with Windows media player. I won't bore you with the details, but I thought I'd reinstall it. So I went to the MS website to download, but can't - it tells me:

"Windows media player is not compatible with your system. You are running Windows 7 64bit. Windows media player will not run on your system ..."

And this for something which has been there, still there and still functioning!

Anybody else ever come across this? How many of you are running media player quite happily with Win7 64bit?

Or got a vote for an even more stupid message!

Roger

[haddock1000]

Well theres the old one that everyone says existed abck in the day, that said something like:

'There is a problem with the keyboard, press F1 to continue'

Don't know whether it actually existed though.

I'm running WMP fine here though. There is a way to force a re-install of core windows programs, but I can't remember it ATM.

thanks,

haddock1000

[dorlan]

WMP is working fine on Windows 7 64bit here!

Have you looked here or here to see if there is a solution to whatever your problem is?

[rogermatthews]

Have you looked here or here to see if there is a solution to whatever your problem is?

yes, both places, that's where I found out I couldn't download it!

The problem was (probably) a corruption of sorts - media player wouldn't play any audio, even though video was OK. I checked all the obvious, and other players worked fine. A simple system restore corrected matters, but unfortunately, the latest restore point was just before I updated my Norton anti-virus (a program update, not just virus definitions). So after the restore, I'd lost my AV!

I didn't fancy having to reinstall Norton AV and go through all the updates, hence I looked for a way to reinstall media player. It may well be on the Windows install disk, I can't recall, but in the end I settled for system restore and reinstalling my Norton (2012 version disk). After endless updates and restarts, all is now as normal - though Windows website still tells me media player won't work!

No need for everyone to tell me that media player is running well on their Win7 64-bit systems - I believe them!

Cheers

Roger

[deltic009]

I remember way back when installing XP Home and I needed to troubleshoot as the network card/internet wasn't working right. So I followed all of the "Try this" "Did this help?" stuff until finally it said "We can't help further, please click here to visit the online support......."

Online support? When you need help connecting to the internet?

[lenfish]

You could try the following:
Control Panel/Programs and Features/Turn Windows Features on or off-untick Media Features/OK. Reboot, do the same again this time re-ticking Media Features. Re-boot once again.

Regards,

Len

[rogermatthews]

Control Panel/Programs and Features/Turn Windows Features on or off-untick Media Features/OK

Len - I DID try that - that didn't work either!

I've no idea what caused my problem, I suspect a corruption of some sort, but I've found system restore generally resolves such minor things. It was just unlucky that, on this occasion, the restore point happened to be after an old version of a program had been uninstalled. All is OK now

Speaking of system restore, I must have done it 5 or 6 times in the past few months, and it has not caused any problems with Train Store (the duplicate folders thing). Perhaps they've sorted it with Win 7

"We can't help further, please click here to visit the online support......."

deltic - that's a good one! I guess we've all had such frustrations. It's like when a piece of hardware (scanner, printer, sound card etc) isn't working and device manager tells you "this device is working properly"!

Cheers

Roger

[Easilyconfused]

I have seen Windows error boxes with no text at all and simply an OK button to press.

Plenty of examples can be found online. Some of the sites with collections of weird error messages have photoshopped fake ones.

[lenfish]

Best one I've ever had, in Vista.



If you have difficulty viewing the image please let me know as I have been having problems.

Regards,

Len