Wednesday, July 04, 2007

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: startmenu.jpgI 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. vista-5219-review-flip3d.jpg
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"?

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home