Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Dear Bill G

Dear Mr. Gates,

I have a few bones to pick with Microsoft about Windows XP. And by the way, I don't give a crap about Vista yet because it's still in Beta testing and whether or not the issues I'm complaining about will have been fixed by the time the commercial version is released are irrelevant for at least 1-2 years after release because it'll probably have bugs up the wazoo. Anyway, here's my beef:

  1. Every time you kill the explorer.exe process, rather than kill just the file explorer window, it kills the entire taskbar including the Start menu. WTF???

  2. Whenever I try to kill a task via the Task Manager, most of the time, I can't even kill the task. Instead, I get this stupid message popping up over and over again saying that the program is not responding. Duh it's not responding! That's why I'm trying to kill the task!!!

  3. Whenever I attempt to perform a Disk Cleanup on my machine, the computer just sits there, sometimes overnight, to bring me to the various disk cleanup options. The older your computer image, the longer you wait.

  4. The built-in defrag tool won't work properly if you're somewhat low on diskspace. Instead, I've had to resort to buying a utility called Perfect Disk. It's a great little tool and it's relatively inexpensive.

  5. Windows XP's so-called recovery program, where you can roll back your machine to a particular point in time in case you screw it up does not work. I have to resort to a separate utility called WinRescue XP which does the job.


So Bill G, if you're out there, hopefully by the time Vista has matured enough, we can see some of these nasty annoyances that I've listed up there fixed, eh? And by the way, what's up with the beefy system requirements of Vista? Geez...remember when you didn't need a fancy graphics card with on-board memory to run an O/S? Guess not...

Yours truly,
IndyComp0T1

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

this is old news now. Write something new.

Adam S. said...

1) This is indeed annoying.. sometimes Windows will start up a new explorer process on it's own.. but sometimes (most?) it does not.

That doesn't mean you need to log off/reboot/etc. All you need to do is give Windows a kick in the pants to start explorer again:
press ctrl-alt-delete
select file->New task(run)
type explorer.exe

OK.. maybe this is common knowledge, but I myself only recently figured this out..

2) Kill the process instead of the task.

3) The main problem here is Windows spends an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how much space it will save by compressing your hard drive. If you have no inclination to do that, you can skip that step with a registry setting, I believe (http://www.tweaknews.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=78773&sid=87a69d221fb7bd85b7c7785891391df0)