10 Things I Hate About Windows Vista

10. System Nags: From the moment I boot up my Vista system, it starts nagging me about things I don't particularly want to know about! From "Could not connect to network drive" (I wasn't trying) to "Could not install USB device blah blah blah". Why not tell me these messages when I actually perform an action that relates to them!

9. Windows Side Bar: Great idea, poor implementation! The Windows side bar sits in the background of all my open windows (kinda like its on the desktop). Why is it then that when I select "Show Desktop", it also hides the side bar - making it harder to access.

8. Start Menu: I have never been a fan of the start menu. It tries to do way too many things. In XP, the list of applications opened up in a sub-menu. Over time, the menu got too long and took ages to load. Vista's solution is to take all the items that over-crowded the submenu in XP, and put them in an even smaller space thats virtually impossible to navigate - GREAT!

7. Windows Search: When longhorn (internal code name for Vista) was announced, one of the killer features was going to be a whole new file system based on SQL Server called WinFS. It was going to make searching for files super easy and super fast! SUPER! Only it never happened. It was removed from Vista and we got stuck with the current system. My main gripe with Vista's search is that, well, if I start searching for a file, and then at the same time start trying to remember where I placed the said file, I shouldn't beat the system. And yet this happens a lot!

6. Sleep? We don't need no stinking sleep: Trying to get my Vista laptop to sleep is harder than getting my 2 year old son to sleep. Seriously, once I select "Sleep", the screen goes black, and the fans go into overdrive. Once in a while the thing eventually goes into sleep mode but the problem is that it then never wakes up. I have to kill it (losing my work) and then cold boot...DOH!

5. Shutdown...Sleep...Hibernate...Restart....: In XP, shutting down was a simple affair. In fact, I used to do the following key combination: Windows Key -> U -> Enter. Job done. In Vista, I have to click the Windows button, then click the button with a little arrow on it, and then I am presented with....wait for it....7 options.

4. UI Design: They say the best UI is where you can finish a task with the least amount of mouse travel and clicks. Why then in Vista do I need 3 clicks to get to the "Display Properties" screen when in XP I only needed one. Same goes for accessing network connections. The developers seemed to have made some changes just for the sake of change.

3. Flip 3D: This is one of the main WOWs of Vista. I am just wowed as to how they took a potentially useful feature and made it completely useless. Flip 3D shows all the open Windows in 3D stack.
The first problem with this is that when you have more than a couple of different sized windows open, selecting the one you need quickly becomes impossible. Secondly, a feature like this needed to be activatable by mouse gestures as well as the keyboard. Again, a great idea poorly implemented.

2. UAC: This is Vista's way of stopping malicious code from executing on your pc without your consent. My problem with this "feature" is not because its so annoying or that it shows up at the oddest of times. The trouble with UAC is again in the way it has been implemented. Lets look at this scenario; a hacker somehow manages to take remote control of my system and decides to execute a program that messes up my system settings: UAC kicks in at the right time to get verification and all the hacker has to do is click "OK"! In other systems such as Mac OS or Linux, the OS asks for the administrator's password for verification instead of just a button click. I wonder how long before someone works out how to programatically click the "OK" button on UAC prompts. Vista SP1 anyone?

1. Windows Explorer: I don't dislike all of Windows Explorer. I in fact believe that it is a more powerful file manager than OS X's Finder. What really ticks me off however is waiting for it to list files, drives or folders that are located on the local drive - the key word there being LOCAL! Why on earth do I get a progress bar and non-responsive windows just trying to list contents of "Computer"?

10 Things I Hate About OS X

10. The Finder: The finder has been part of Mac OS since, well, forever. In OS X, the Finder is fairly limited in functionality and sometimes cannot seem to keep up with the user. For example, when you try to connect to a network that is no longer available, the Finder completely hangs until it times out. Another annoying gem is how you can right-click and copy a file and yet you cannot use "cut" to move a file.

9. No easy access to the current date: I can't count the number of times I have looked at the menu bar hoping to find out the current date, but instead all I get in the current day and time. My only options are clicking on Dashboard in the dock or clicking on the time to display the time.

8. No system uninstaller: One of the things I love about the Mac is that most apps come as packages and installation is just a case of dragging the icon from the disk image to a place of the hard disk. Uninstallation of these packages is done by simply dragging the icon into the Trash. There are however some applications that need to put their files in other areas of the hard disk and therefore come with an installer like that found in Windows. The problem here is that in order to uninstall these kinds of apps, you have to re-download the original application and hope that the publisher bothered to create an uninstaller. Apple needs to implement a system uninstaller.

7. Font dialogue:
The font dialogue in OS X is so unfriendly with its tiny labels...Anyway, a picture is worth a thousand words as the say.

6. Zoom button: Even though I started my computing life in Mac OS 7, I spend a considerable time in Windows for my work and one of the things I miss is the ability to maximize the window to full screen. Apple could implement this and keep the current behavior (the window only resizes to the maximum required size to fit the window's current contents) by having an "Option-Zoom" that maximizes the window.

5. No virtualization: I know and understand the reasons but it still sucks that I can't run OS X in a virtual machine.

4. No resize from all edges: Windows in OS X can only be resized from the bottom-right corner and no-where else. Not sure what the design reason is for this little gem but it irritates the hell out of me.

3. Round Corners: The corners of the screen (and in fact most windows) in OS X are rounded. I believe this originates to the original Mac whose physical display had rounded corners. In this day and age of LCD screens, there is no longer any reason for the rounded edges. Get rid of it already!

2. The Trash: In pre OS X versions of OS X, the trash icon was located on the desktop (Windows copied the idea). In OS X, its located in the dock and there is no proper way to relocate it (not even an alais).

1.Development Tools: This may just be a personal preference but developing applications on OS X is a lot harder to get into than the equivalent in Windows.


Coming next, 10 things I hate about Windows Vista....