I wish Windows had a version for grown ups

General Computing *nix and other operating systems
1

When you finally get really bored with looking at your O so pretty Vista desktop and lovely rendering on your sidebar, if you are like me you would have got to wondering how much effort all that took which is wasted. I am not a big fan of pretty desktops, I don’t spend any time on my desktop, I tend to run applications and therefore the desktop is hidden.

So if you’re out there Mr Gates please have a look at some of the following which the rank amateurs in the open source community have written (for nothing) and let us have a Windows Adult Edition. This list is not exhaustive and is all IMVHO but I’d rather your boys and girls spent their time on this sort of thing than more and more pointless eye candy…

Registered applications - why is this set system wide and not by user? If I want to run Firefox and iTunes but my buddy who shares my machine wants Explorer and Media Player why can’t we?

TCP/IP - before writing any more networking code please produce a version of the TCP/IP stack which works longer than 72 hours without attention

Forced reboot on update - no. No no no no no. Why does your operating system need all these reboots anyway? Can’t it stop and start a system service while running??

Are you sure? Yes I bloody well am and I want to be able to finally convince my machine that this is the case by switching off all the nanny-state hand-holding prompts, confirmations and nag messages from Windows Insecurity Centre. If I switch off the prompts and trash my machine that’s my problem OK? Just deal with it.

Why can’t I preview mp3 files by simply mousing over them in Explorer? I don’t want to launch a player, I just want to know if that’s the song I was thinking of.

Why on earth do you make your system write “thumbs” files everywhere when they are not periodically refreshed? Why write thumbs files for video files anyway when media centre refreshes the thumbnails (but not the thumbs files) every time it browses the directory? Surely I should be able to decide how my system thumbnails local and network files, how they are previewed?

If my screen is in screensaver lock, would it not be nice to have a “leave message” button so that others can do just that? And be informed of said messages - with time and date stamp - when I unlock the screen?

Why can’t I uninstall all the bits of Windows which I don’t use? Why is it all or nothing on install? Surely once it has been established by the software that it is genuine there would be no problem installing extra bits I am entitled to from the net?

Why aren’t the desktop toolbars and notification areas more configurable? I might not want a volume control, might want my default icons displayed in different places, why is it so difficult?

Can I have a real delete command on the context menus please? Recycling does not work on large files or network shares anyway, so what’s the difference?

If we are going to have a bloated registry full of mime types, file types, file permissions why does your operating system still use file extensions to decide what type a file is?

Enough, enough.

2

Quite a list innit, and yet, it’s by no means exausted. One of the reasons I’ve bought a Mac is in the hope that most of these irritating niggles will disappear once and for all… fingers X’d?

3

A good a valid list of things that shouldn’t be impossible to do ?

4

A few of those have already happend… and are in Windows 7… like being able to turn of UAC… when that was announced im sure the whole IT world jumped for joy…

:slight_smile:

5

Heh, UAC can be turned off in Vista, only problem is if you turn it off it nags you telling you it has been turned off. Maybe a valid message ONCE but please, a tick box saying “don’t tell me this again”? And is this turning off a valid reason for Insecurity Centre to display a red cross constantly? Should be called Hysterically Paranoid Centre.

6

Still on XP Pro here, and I’ve always stayed clear of Windows Update, first thing I do on a reformat (usually once a year) is to turn the damn thing off :ghey:

Last time I used it was for SP2 - and only then because I needed it for some applications to run correctly. I guess I’ll be screwed if I ever have to watch Snow White though :lol:

By ‘working’ on a friends Vista machine though I understand where you’re coming from with the Hysterically Paranoid Centre :wink:

7

Mine does my nut in when it keeps telling me that its blocked some programs on start up, I know, I told you too… but it has to keep telling me this :frowning:

UAC is ok, after your through the initial week or so on the new system its not a problem to have it on, stopped my kids installing carp on more than one occasion as they need my password to elevate (why do i think darlek when I type that).

8

To right - I get fed up of being unable to arrange the programs on the taskbar and I want 2 taskbars ala Gnome!

The reboot seems to be becoming more common on Linux (well Ubuntu has asked me to restart a few times after an update - maybe a kernel update?)

9

TCP/IP - dunno what you’re doing to it, mine has no trouble with staying up indefinitely. I can easily get uptimes of a month, only interrupted by the monthly patch cycle.

Forced reboot - goes back to old design decisions where a lot of stuff that needs to be patch isn’t a service, but lower level. Yes it is a flaw. Actually, I do believe MS has technology for servers that lets it update services while they’re still running by directly applying the patch in memory. Don’t even need to stop it. But I think this is currently very limited to critical server issues.

Turning off prompts - if you’re tiered of the security advice thingy nagging you UAC is off, turn the security advice thing off too. Windows will happily run without it. Simples.

Uninstalling bits of windows, you kinda can using 3rd party tools like xplite.

Delete - if you don’t want to go via recycle there is a key modifier while deleting to bypass it. No idea what it is as I don’t use it. Or just turn off recycle bin totally if you hate it that much. You have the power.

File types by extension - just history I guess. Always has been that way.

While here, I have one simple request for most modern non-Windows OS out there (includes Linux, Unix, MacOS etc…). Give me the ability to turn off mouse acceleration! Easily that is. MacOS - this is the worst offender there. 3rd party hacks can get it close, but not close enough. Apple practically hard coded it so you can’t. Ubuntu allows you to get close too, making it quite tolerable. Never found the option in KDE, but I haven’t tried a recent version. Until they fix this simple basic functionality, it renders those OSes practically unusable to me. Thankfully Windows has had it at least as far back as 3.0.

10

Having worked at M$ and also Apple I can tell you they do listen, but the issue is the masses don’t have a clue. Yes a grown up version for pro would be great allowing custom everything changes, but is that good? The real issue is the moving target on apps running on the OS. These wonderful apps can take down an OS tweak or not in seconds. Good error handlers in apps is easy the issue is why doesn’t it happen? I think with all the lines of code we simply get a little lazy, and miss that basics sometimes. So for OS tweak, the registery is there for reason have at it. Modify the kernal in Linux and see if that makes you happy, all those apps won’t like it and that’s what you use the OS for anyway! Sorry to be a kill joy just my 2 cents being cast on the waters.

11

Nicely put Martin

Also why is evrything so big these days. Remember adding a printer: select Printers>HP>Laserjet4 and it did it in seconds. Just spent a happy 45 mins installing a mono laser on 3 machines :mad:

12

Why did it take so long Mr B? I used to add printers on a network using a TCP/IP port instead of an LP1 port and I could set them going in two minutes as long as I had the drivers to hand.

13

I find Windows 7 is so much nicer to use than vista (which I only used occasionally when I was on the lappy…for the short time it was installed on the lappy!). Was not a fan of vista in the slightest, which is why I stayed with XP pro until we got Win 7.

14

Because it took 10 mins, - yes 10 mins :mad: - per machine for the bloatware to install from the CD. Would have been the same if I’d done it over the network. Jees, its just a printer.

15

Digging this up again - why cant Windows support . in it’s folder names? Linux can do it no issue but I’ve just spend an hour and half trying to merge two folder before I realised that one had a . in the path and thus wouldn’t move to the server.

16

Ooh don’t get me started, in the year or so since I wrote that I’ve found so many more things I could rant about, Fedora 13 in particular should be mandatory studying for Winblows designers. Clever, slick, fast, polished? hehehehe unknown concept BSOD.

Short answer to your question? Because even Winblows 7 is still DoS with nobs on, and can’t even distinguish between lower- and uppercase versions of the same letter. So it thinks there’s only one “.” in a filename (dir names are just filenames, right?)- right before the file extension, which it needs to decide what type of file it is, when it looks it up in the highly efficient 42 squillion lines of pointless bloat called The Registry. Because it’s dumb.

17

Erm… I just tried making various folders with . or multiple . in the name, consecutive and separated, and it did it every time no fuss. Tried on Win7-64 and Vista-32.

18

I have numerous projectname.revision.version folders, works fine for me :slight_smile:

DT.

19

Go to yer own forum Winblows fanboys :slight_smile:

20

:haha: :haha: was sure you knew me better than that :lol:

DT.