A frugal life is an easy life!

Link: http://download.cnet.com/VLC-Media-Player/3000-13632_4-10267151.html

The purpose of any media player, is to play media, DVD,CD, MP3, etc, all on your computer, easily, quickly and error free.
So why are there so many problems and issues with windows media player?

Mrs frugal has a laptop, she uses it rarely, but on occasion she likes to surf the internet and listen to her music and watch a DVD if others in the house are busy with something.
Today, her latest work out DVD landed, so on goes the laptop, it had not been used for a while, so I logged onto windows updates for her and downloaded and installed more than 120 security and updates, so she was safe to browse the net.

Amongst those updates, was the update to install windows media player 11.

All complete, she restarted her computer and placed her DVD in the drive ready to watch and burn?
Then up comes the windows media player 11 error message: "Windows media player cannot play the DVD as there is a problem with your decoder, DVD drive and video card. Try downloading new drivers for your video card to resolve the fault" - How helpful... NOT!

Like many people, Mrs frugal is as likely to know how to do this, as she is likely to know how to milk a cow.
Her computer came over to me, along with various mild insults and stories of bad luck "always happening to me!"
Now windows is always stressing the importance of only running files from a trusted source and keep upto date with security.
So my first port of call was the microsoft website. After looking through various lists to "troubleshoot" problems with various versions of media player, none of which dealt with our problem, (why do they sell programs that are fundamentally flawed?) I reached for google.

Amongst the list of links to our problem, was a website that had exactly the same problem, listing updated codec files (suggesting this to Mrs frugal would have got me a smack in the chops) I verified the link before downloading the file... not good, it linked to another website of a dubious nature, so I gave up without downloading.

After 30 minutes of messing around reading rubbish and angrily shouting abuse at the microsoft website, I reached for a trusted and never failing alternative, VLC media player.
First rule, get a program from a trusted source, so downloads.com was visited and VLC was typed in their search bar.

It is an open source player, which is free to use, to date has been downloaded more than 19 MILLION times from the site.
Downloaded and installed in 3 minutes, Mrs frugal was happy as she could now watch her exercise DVD with ease and no messing about!
So good is the VLC player, I have linked it to this post and will put up a link in the sidebar and over at our LINKS section for you.

Windows media player failing to work is an example of why I like Rhod Gilbert's work so much, he simply asks the question, why does everything have to be so complicated?
A global company, microsoft,  employing vast numbers of staff and people who tells us all how good they are, yet their simple products fail when trying to do the basics is not good at all.