There are doubtless a number of things Microsoft employees will miss about Bill Gates when he toddles off to airdrop billions on charities, but his email rants won’t be one of them.

To mark his passing, the Seattle Post Intelligencer has dug out what it bills as an “epic rant” to poor Jim Allchin, describing the world of pain the Microsoft boss sufferred when he tried to download and install Windows Moviemaker in 2003.

My favourite lines from the five-page diatribe:

“So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time. What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?”

A question we’ve asked ourselves many a time. And what about this little insight:

“Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.”

Perhaps you should try re-installing Windows, Bill. He goes on:

“So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.”

And the icing on the cake:

“When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback.”

I bet Jim couldn’t wait for the second installment to ping into his inbox.

It’s good to see that even the man in charge of Microsoft suffers the same infuriating problems we do. It’s just a shame he didn’t do more about them before jetting off into the sunset.

You can read our Farewell Bill Gates feature here