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20 Things You Won't Like About Vista
feminazi writes "Computerworld's Scot Finnie details 20 things you won't like in Windows Vista, with a visual tour to prove it. He says that MS has favored security over end-user productivity, making the user feel like a rat caught in a maze with all the protect-you-from-yourself password-entry and 'Continue' boxes required by the User Account Controls feature." From the article: "In its supreme state of being, Microsoft knows precisely what's best for you. It knows that because its well-implemented new Sleep mode uses very little electricity and also takes only two or three seconds to either shut down or restart, you want to use this mode to 'turn off' your computer, whether you realize it or not. It wants to teach you about what's best. It wants to make it harder for you to make a mistake."
Bla bla Apple bla bla
Vista will be the first expensive Microsoft product in history
He hates the Regular/Diet/New/Classic thing
title == body
Menu usability issue
Driver issues
People haven't written enough 'Gadgets' yet
New error reporting system feels very one-way
title == body
A menu has moved
A menu has moved
Bad network menu usability
A menu has moved
Peer to peer networking is still iffy
A menu has moved
title == body
Five words: He doesn't like Secure Desktop
Another 'Proceed' button to click
UI gripes
Hardware requirements are high.
(Welcome to the world of tomorrow!)
Here is a link to the Human Readable version of this story that isn't split into 49853809 pages. Thank god for the "print this page" feature.
So, this is one of those annoying super advertisement sites. I recommend just using the print version instead of having to flip through every freaking page. The print version also has less ads.
My work here is dung.
- When selecting, automatically select entire word
- Show full menus after a short delay
- Copy and Paste of subtotals copies and pastes all the data, unless you paste to Notepad and then back to Excel, that makes sense.
- "Cutting" in Excel is totally broken anyway--it doesn't cut a damn thing--you WANT to leave that data there until you paste it elsewhere. You do, really.
- Spontaneous hyperlinking! THANKS!
They've always seemed waaaaaay to interested in the minutiae of my interactions with their software. Makes me crazy.blarg.
So...anything 99% of my users at work won't be doing on a normal basis is protected by the popup boxes you so loathe. In fact, from your quote here, in a normal work day all but one of my users will never see or use any of the items on that list. Yet your claim is that the boxes are so ubiquitous they interfered with the normal operation of the computer. I think no.
I haven't tried the beta yet, but a lot of people seem to mention this. From what I've read, it does not sound unreasonable, but at the same time the UI does sound like it was written by the usual idiots. "Continue" buttons?!? Gee, what a great way to condition your users to not read yet another series of pop-ups. Did all their UI designers get their degree through the mail or something?
The peer networking at my office is not balky. It works flawlessly and seamlessly. I've established that you're not a Windows user.
I take exception to this. Windows desktop to desktop networking is balky, especially on Win2K or in environments that mix Win2K and Windows XP. In an office of 100 machines, in multiple workplaces I've found it is normal to see a random subset of the machines actually on the network at a given time. I remember having to transfer a file to someone's shared directory and asking the people nearby, "who can see Bob's desktop?" and then getting them to transfer the file to him.
Seriously, remember back when you could read an entire article on one page instead of clicking through 20+ pages so the site could bump up the number of ad impressions they score?
Not really, no. I remember using Gopher and Usenet, then shortly afterwards using a Web full of hit-count whores. I must have blinked during this other era you are describing.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Yeah, people had the same reactions to Windows XP Service Pack 2. Everyone spent years telling Microsoft to improve security. Security was more important than convenience and compatibility, why couldn't they see that? So finally, Microsoft sacrificed compatibility for the sake of improved security*, and what happened? Suddenly, everyone was complaining about broken apps in SP2, and how dare Microsoft ship something that screwed up.
*XP SP2 security is still swiss cheese, but it's better than the soap bubbles you get with XP SP1.
My Acer laptop running WinXP has Stand By (draining the battery a little) and Hibernate (no drain) and both work like a charm. No problems whatsoever. Restarts are few and far in-between. Does this make my laptop unique?
Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!
In the Network section of your System Prefereces, there is a place to move around the Wi-Fi network priority list. You can tell it to join the last one you were on, or the one closest to the top of the list (you could even remove your neighbor's network from the list completely), or to just join one precise network and don't look for anything else.
Try messing around there and see if you solve the problem.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Here is what Bruce Schneier thinks of Vista's UAC feature.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
From MacInTouch, about a year and a half ago:
Jan. 25, 2005
Boyd Waters
I plugged the power brick of my Mac Mini into a simple integrating power meter. Here is what I measured:
Off 0-2 Watts
Booting 30-40 Watts
Idle 25 Watts
Sleep 3-5 Watts, almost always 3 Watts
The power brick is rated at 85 Watts output. I have yet to measure power consumption during a compute-intensive task such as DVD playback.
I think the 40 Watt max was during hard disk and DVD spin-up at boot time. Idle means that the disk is spinning, booted, logged in, at the Finder with no user input.
I have a rather complex array of stuff plugged into the Mini via USB; there are two switches and at least one USB cable with in-line LED indicators, a wireless receiver for keyboard and mouse (Gyration, recommended, works fine with Mac or PC).
Of course this power reading does not include the monitor or the external FireWire disk.
I note that this power consumption level compares favorably with my 15-inch aluminum PowerBook, which has approximately the same specifications as the Mac Mini (but cost 3 times as much). The 15 PowerBook draws about 25 Watts nominally, about twice that under heavy compute load or charging the battery while running (as opposed to charging the battery during sleep).
Further note that the power brick and monitor are plugged into an APC uninterruptible power supply (a power strip with a battery back-up); I have yet to measure the difference in power consumption at the UPS wall outlet, but with the Mini asleep at 3 Watts, it's possible that the Mini makes no measurable difference in power consumption at the wall outlet.
If you put your laptop to sleep a couple of times a day, and have no problem coming out of sleep or hibernate modes, then you are unique.
We have 45 salespeople with laptops who put their Windows laptops to sleep all the time without problems, but that's only because they shut down or restart once a week to avoid freezes, etc.
We have about 4-5 Mac laptops over the last 6 years that are always left in sleep mode, and I'm talking continuous sleep mode for up to a year at a time. We've never had a problem with Mac laptops going into or coming out of sleep mode.
Of all the salespeople we have with Windows laptops, many, many of them tell me how they close the lid of their laptop to put it to sleep, put it in their briefcase, then go to a customer or home (at the end of the day), and when they get to their destination, their briefcase is 150 degrees F because their laptop didn't actually go to sleep. And, either this causes a freeze-up, automatic shutdown because the laptop couldn't stay running with the screen on for more than 45 minutes, or it generally concerns me and them that the screen or hard disk could get screwed up. That hasn't with the Mac laptops in about 7+ years.
If you've never had problems like I'm describing, then you are very lucky or just have a new laptop (less than 6 months old). I'm telling you, however, that most people who use Windows laptops do have these problems and just live with them.
[rant]
If you don't think that Windows drivers can get corrupted on desktops, laptops, and servers for no real reason, causing bluescreens and general hard crashes, you haven't used Windows for very long. Why else would people like me have to reinstall drivers on Windows computers/servers even though the computer is never shut down or rebooted?
What's amazing with Windows is how you can use 3 apps on a Windows machine for 6 months, and have problems like these even though you never change anything after you initially set it up. I have a Windows desktop at home that I use to browse the web and play 3-4 different games, all of which were installed from the beginning. Everything else I do on our Mac laptops and computers. So, I use that desktop 2-3 times a week, maybe 10 hours a week. It should work the same way on day 180 that it worked on day 1, right?
Wrong.
Nothing has changed except installing high priority Windows patches (which you can't avoid) -- nothing else has been installed, and the games were patched only on day 1. But, boot and login times are slow, and I'm having video choppiness in some, but not all the games.
And, I'm not some idiot who doesn't have antivirus installed from day 1, or who would install miscellaneous crap without knowing it. Everything is the same, but Windows just *degrades* over time from continuous unchanging use. It shouldn't, but it does. So, even with a computer like that, I know I'm going to be reinstalling Windows a year after day 1. That's better than the 3-6 months I get with other Windows computers that are heavily used and changed, but still, why does Windows just fall apart while other OS's don't?
And, don't tell me it's because we install so much more crap in Windows than on other machines because we can. I've had Windows servers that are set up, locked down from day one, don't change, run 24x7, and then their video or ethernet drivers get corrupted causing a bluescreen that won't go away until I reinstall the drivers.
[/rant]
Sorry about that, but a lot of us on Slashdot have a lot (and I do mean a lot) of experience with the Windows frustrations that some people think are myths...
I own an Acer laptop too, and I rarely restart it too. At any rate, according to the "Acer ePowerManagement" program my laptop currently with a full charge has a battery life of 156 hours in Standby or 65 days in Hibernation. The difference on a laptop is that in Standby, the RAM is kept on and in Hibernation the RAM is turned off. On a desktop computer with an ATX power supply there is a +5V rail on the power supply that is always on regardless of whether the computer is in Standby, Hibernation or in Shutdown. The only way to completely stop a desktop from drawing power is by turning the switch on the back of the power supply if present or unplugging the computer. I would not worry about this though as a computer turned off would use at the most 30W and probably much less. (Yes, I know the +5V rail is rated at 10W on an ATX power supply, but some power is lost as heat from the power conversion. In any case the difference between Standby and Hibernate is that Standby allows the computer to recover much faster than Hibernate after being powered up again.
At any rate in regards to the GP there are several potential pitfalls for the "Standby" state in for the average Windows user on a PC.
The biggest potential pitfall is that the PC may not have ACPI enabled in the BIOS on the computer. This problem is impossible to fix without a complete reinstall of Windows XP on a computer with ACPI disabled. Fortunately it is impossible to turn off ACPI support in the BIOS of most computers from within the last two to three years.
Another pitfall is the sleep state that the computer is set to in the BIOS. In the BIOS, the Standby state should be set to S3 or Auto and not S1. By default in the BIOS many of the motherboards I have used for home-built computers have had their Standby state set to S1. Standby in S1 mode keeps the PSU, the CPU and the fans running which is pretty pointless. Standby in S3 mode is better at it actually turns the computer off.
Another potential pitfall with respect to Standby is generally hardware problems. The most common problem is an older computer with a broken BIOS. Also some hardware drivers that are usually older do not support Standby. Another problem is that there are some older Seagate SATA drives with broken firmware that do not to turn back from Standby after being turned off in S3 mode. A less common problem that occurs more often with workstations and poorly designed laptops is that there may be too many RAM chips and too much power draw for the PSU or the battery to power them.
Another problem usually with a fresh install of Windows is that the standard video driver in Windows totally lacks support for any Standby or Hibernation mode. In any case install all of your hardware drivers and see if Standby works then.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
Have you used it?
The 'prompt' consists of:
'Rundll32 wants to run a privileged operation. OK?'
The 'help' consists of:
'c:\windows\system32\rundl32.exe Shell32.dll,Control_RunDll appwiz.cpl'
Sorry, that isn't informing users at all.
Plus it comes up *constantly* - it's the most annoying feature I've ever seen in an OS - and that's coming from someone who's used OS/400..
How many posts have you read from Mac users touting how secure Os X is because if you try to do anything important to the system, a box pops up and asks for the root password??
Just a nitpick: it actually asks for any administrator's password, so if your own account has administrator privileges, that'd be your own password. Actually, it asks for both the username and password, with the username already filled in if you are logged on as an administrator; you can enter the username and password of any administrator account.
It doesn't ask for the root password, because (by default) there isn't one (and setting one isn't obvious). This means you don't have two different passwords to keep track of, just yours.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;