I’ve been a Windows user since version 3.0. That’s a pretty long time. Indeed, I even used Windows NT 3.1, which was a fairly rare product “in the wild”. Over the years, I have watched the bug count drop dramatically. Not just the true “bugs”, but the stuff that the programmers joke about and say, “that’s not a ‘bug’, it’s a ‘feature’”. Still, Vista still has a few of these quirks (and a few new ones), and they drive me nuts.
Re-arranging the Start Menu
UAC is great, in my mind. I love the fact that if something serious is happening, I need to sign off on it. I think that UAC is probably something that most people get “Click-Yes-Itis” very quickly to, but I don’t. Now that being said, it drives me absolutely nuts that re-arranging the Start Menu involves signing off on so many things per drag/drop operation. First, it needs administrator approval. Then, UAC comes up. Then I need to confirmt he move. And if the destination folder already exists (like if a service pack re-created the Start Menu entry in the original location), I need to merge the folders together. Argh! Luckily, I only need to put up with this on an occassional basis.
When things on the Start Menu get moved…
This has been a problem with Windows since Day 1. The OS simply has zero awareness of the Start Menu, other than it being a standard directory tree. This is fine, and I am sure that it saved them a ton of programmer hours. The problem is, if the user re-arranges the Start Menu in any way, it causes pure chaos. For example, I create, at the top level, functional categories such as “Multimedia”, “Communications”, and “Programming” on my Start Menu, and then move the entries for installed applications as needed. Very few applications (on most installs for me, only Microsoft Office) still warrant their own top level entry. This works great for me, until the application gets updated. Service packs and patches re-create the original top-level entry. Uninstall does not remove the entry because it is not where the uninstaller thinks it should be. The answer is for someone at Microsoft to spend a week or two writing some code to make this smarter.
Lack of a proper “Shadows” file type
OS/2 had a great file type called a “Shadow”. *Nix has a similar idea in the form of a file link. The idea is that a file has 1 physical entry, but you can have other files which appear in other directories (or in the same directory) which “point to” the file. No, not like Window’s useless shortcuts. The problem with shortcuts is that they are too much of a hybrid model; you have a 50/50 short of working with the shortcut file itself, not its target. With a “shadow” file, operations always act upon the target, with a few rare exceptions. Ask a shadow where it is, and it gives you the shadow’s directory path, not the target’s. Deletion always removes the shadow, not the target. And so on. But the idea is that when you act upon the shadow’s metadata (say, right-clicking on it), you get the target’s information, not the shadow’s. That’s what I really hate about shortcuts, you need to follow them to the original file to do a lot of useful things. Bleh.
Recyle Bin Navigation
It is still a pain in the neck to get around the Recycle Bin. I go in there about twice a year, but when I do, I would like to be able to find what I am looking for. Am I being picky? Maybe. But I would still like to see this improved.
The Registry
I remember back to 1994-1995 when Microsoft hailed the Registry as being this awesome thing that would prevent people from needing to work hard to find INI files, and to make managing these things more uniform. It did that. Now, it is uniformly difficult to find what you need in the Registry. Unless you are a Registry magician familiar with all of the odd hierarchies, it is nealry impossible to find what you are looking for in there.
Regedit
On that note, why has Regedit remained unchanged since 1995? Would a proper “Find All/Replace All” hurt? Given the level of knowledge of the average person running Regedit, would a regular expression Find/Replace be too high level of a feature? Why is Regedit more primitive than Notepad?
Backups
Why does Vista Backup consider backing up to a directly attached drive to be the Holy Grail of backing up, and treat backups to network locations as second class citizens, particular for the full system state backups? Why does Vista Backup not have a way of smartly rotating my backups and “folding” them together in a way so that I don’t have to wipe out all of my backups every few months and restart them? Why do both Vista Backup and Windows Server 2008 Backup feel like a massive step backwards from the capable but feature poor backup in previous versions?
What Windows quirks drive you nuts?
J.Ja