It's always a shame when one special occasion interferes with another, isn't it? Just ask anyone whose birthday happens to be within three days of Christmas how many "combined" presents they get and you'll see what we mean. So we have to apologize to fans of Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day for our lack of celebration last Friday, but what with Thanksgiving and everything we were comatose at the time, and it's really tough to celebrate anything with a pulse rate of 40. But had we been conscious, we surely would have tackled the juicy topic of a UK governmental Windows XP upgrade gone horribly awry. In fact, you know what? There's no way we can force ourselves to sit on this for another week, so let's have last week's WO-TM-BD right now. Better late than never, right?

So here's the skinny: faithful viewer N Gray tipped us off to an article in The Register which reports that the UK's Department for Work and Pensions was doing a trial network upgrade of "about seven" desktop PCs from Windows 2000 to Windows XP last Monday. Unfortunately, something went slightly wrong: instead of seven PCs getting upgraded, every PC connected to the network "received a partial, but fatal, 'upgrade,'" and when the dust had settled, "75-80 percent of the DWP's 80,000 PCs" had been blue-screened and rendered unbootable. Whoops! That's sort of the IT equivalent of trying to make pancakes and accidentally blowing up Oregon.

Reportedly even while Microsoft consultants "flown in from the U.S." were feverishly working to restore the 60,000 casualties of a seven-machine upgrade, the DWP was putting a happy spin on the whole mess, insisting that the department's computers were actually working just fine, with the tiny exception of "80 percent of desktop computers" that were "not connecting through to the mainframe systems." (Oh, is that all.) But the emergency payments system was "working perfectly" (once it finally came online two days later, that is), and we're sure that by now things are largely back to normal, except for what we imagine must be a massive hole in the department's IT budget following the disappearance of the sort of cash that was likely charged by those imported consultants. Still, live and learn.

So there you have it: use Windows, kill most of your desktops. In the end, though, can we really blame a botched upgrade of biblical proportions on Microsoft? Well, no, not really, except perhaps in two limited ways. The first is that if the upgrade process had been more straightforward and bulletproof in the first place, even the dimmest bulb on the tree might have been able to upgrade seven desktops without nuking 60,000 more. The second is that if Windows weren't as mediocre as it is, maybe it wouldn't be the official operating system choice of the terminally feeble-minded. Ya think?