12 Months of Vista written 3 years ago

If you might remember a long while ago, I embarked upon the magical world of Windows Vista aroundabout 12 months ago. Well, you probably won’t know unless you also read Paul’s blog, and also read the post where Paul and I enumerated the many things we disliked about Vista.

So, what’s changed over the past 12 months, and what still Grinds my Gears?

• The random black screens are most alarming, ferrinstance, clicking on the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon will spawn an insta-black screen.

  I solved this by disabling the UAC “secure desktop” thingy. Now the UAC prompts still appear, but don’t cause my graphics card to spasm

• I agree on the bastardised Media Center, navigating large folders of videos is less than useless. Trying to exit the program is decidedly non-trivial, in comparison with MCE. And what is the deal with the tiny minimised video when menu-navigating? The space for the old-size video is still there!

  This still Grinds my Gears, but I’ve got used to it. The rediculous addendum to this is to try to browse a DVD full of videos — there’s a ten minute wait-penalty whilst it generates the appropriate random thumbnail for each video.

• Alt + Tab has been cunted about, so it’s no-longer easy to swap between stuff without looking what you’re doing. Thankfully there’s a hack to return it to it’s previous state.

  I’ve reverted this back to it’s default state, and don’t notice it anymore. I figured I don’t actually look at the screen anyway, and just alt tab until I get what I want.

• The sidebar doesn’t stay shown when you click “show desktop” meaning it’s essentially useless, as it’s always buried.

  Sidebar has been disabled for ages now, as I didn’t really have a use for it .. I have the occasional widget running undocked though and floating on the desktop.

• UAC is indeed terrible, I’ve not decided if I want to turn it off yet though. Though I suspect if any tiny nasties wanted to install stuff, I’d click OK anyway.

  With the above fix (and SP1), UAC provides the perfect amount of predictable questions about performing administrative tasks

• The search is useless. I thought it was meant to be magical in Vista, but if it can’t find a file which I can see with my own eyes then what’s the point of it?

  Search is still useless.

• Even though Explorer has every display option available under the sun, I still can never find the one I want. Where’s regular icons view?! Sometimes a folder full of movie previews is useless.

  Once you’ve found the button this gripe is easily solved.

• For some crazy reason I’m prevented from looking at the “sendto” folder.

  I wasn’t doing it right: %APPDATA%MicrosoftWindowsSendTo

• Want to sort by modified time on a folder full of videos? No can do!

  Can add this column easily. Still should be there by default.

• Add/Remove programs is now called Sausages and Bacon, for all I know.

  Still an insane renaming of a common point of call.

• I can’t log on as Administrator. (Home Premium)

  Still can’t.

• The Sound Mixer is weird. I can’t decide if I like it or not, but it did mean I had to do lots of prodding and poking of Media Center when it stopped playing audio for recorded TV, but made noises for everything else. Perhaps proving that the new Audio Mixer is broken? The new Audio mixer has per-application settings. Which is handy for making windows noises extra quiet (I may actually leave them enable because of this), and arguably more useful than the previous individual controls. But I can’t help thinking it’s just too darn complicated.

  I’ve grown to love the sound mixer, it means I can have sounds exactly how I want them. Sometimes I want firefox muted (there still exist some crazy websites that insist on playing music at me), and I generally have Winamp much louder than anything else.

• The “solution center” tries to solve problems that don’t exist.

  After the first week the solution center couldn’t find any problems to solve. Perhaps it solved them all? Who knows.

• When an application goes tits up, all I get is “The Application has stopped working”. That hardly lets me know that a potential catastrophe has occurred. I want cryptic error messages, and mumblings of accessing pure virtual calls and things.

  I don’t actually care about this, and if I did there are plenty of ways of getting more logging than I could ever care about.

• The filesystem only seems to be able to handle one copy/paste operation at a time.

  as of SP1 multiple copies/pastes seem much better

• When doing a cut and paste where a folder already exists (merge), it will leave the old directory structure behind. I mean, why?! There’s no use it could possibly have being left behind, and it changes behaviour that’s been around for ages. The first time it happened I thought I’d forgotten to actually move the stuff, and ended up deleting a bunch of files.

  I don’t know what clever beanie babies they had working on the folder manipulation commands, but after a while you begin to love them. Make a new folder with the same name as an existing one, and it doesn’t error — it asks you if you perhaps wanted the original folder. Spiffing.

• The only benefit of Aero I can find is that when an application stops responding, you can’t duplicate millions of windows on screen. It keeps on looking pretty, and even dims the window to stop your continued poking.

  Still not found a real benefit, looks pretty though.

• IE7 = Useless, too much moved around. All these apps should have a stupid mode, for people that have learnt them off by heart, and know the refresh button should be there damnit.

  Havent’ used much of IE7 at all. (Notably this site breaks in IE7)

• I found it very annoying that I couldn’t move off the entire “My Documents” folder to a new place. Now everything is rooted at your profile folder, it’s almost impossible to change the location without a degree in Computer Science. Oh, wait.

  Most things could be moved, but lots of things I would have liked to have been elsewhere stayed in my profile directory. It hasn’t actually been an issue though

• Things that should be quick still sometimes hang for no reason. I could pass it off on my old machine, but on something that’s essentially top - o - the range processor wise it’s a bit silly.

  Being a computer is a hard job, it’s good to rest every now and then.

• The Restore Window button in MCE sometimes requires two prods to achieve anything.

  Fixed as of SP1

• Notepad still refuses to acknowledge that there are unix file endings out there.

  Is why there’s Notepad++ really.

• Image preview doesn’t show GIF files. They’re passed to the browser. This is because Photo Gallery doesn’t know GIF files exist. Seems silly to me. I’ll stop now eh?

  Checking now they seem to open okay in Photo Gallery, — but let’s not forget that Windows Photo Preview is terrible when it comes to rendering colours.

Any New Grievencies?

I can’t actually think of anything else really wrong with Vista.

Any cool things you’ve discovered?

• The “Now Playing” Gadget is awesome;
• Startbar application search = most useful thing in town;
• It’s all cool, man.

How’s the rest of the world being treated by Vista, one year on?

← previous entry | next entry → Mon 26th May 2008 - 21:28 | 2 comments | tagged with Computery Stuff