Windows Stupidities

I realise that I go on an awful lot about how much I dislike Macintosh computers. Well, I don't exactly dislike them - I respect that they're vastly efficient machines, but their usefulness for me is very limited because they neither have any decent MOD program nor Multimedia Fusion. The advantages are that they seem more network-ready than Windows ever was (until XP, anyway) while not being as terrifying as Linux, and their laptop models actually work, unlike every PC laptop I've ever seen where the battery goes completely dead in three months flat.

I don't have a particular vendetta against Macs - I dislike using Linux at least as much. However, as I'm beginning to realise, Windows isn't without its problems either, and I'm going to point these out in excruciating detail in an attempt to redress the balance. I'm well aware that like many of my entries this is essay-length, but I'm sure Whitney at least will find it a refreshing read.

To get me started, this is one that Whitney mentioned to me when I told her of the idea for this article. To get to My Computer and therefore the directory view, you can't go there directly - you have to minimize everything and go to the desktop first.

The truth is that there are countless ways to do this, but none of them are exactly intuitive. Because I'm a fan of keyboard shortcuts, what I do is press Windows-E to bring up an Explorer window - this feature has been in Windows since at least Win 98, but it's not exactly well documented at all. An alternative is to right-click on the Start button and select Explore. When I try that on this computer, I also get the option to "Browse with Paint Shop Pro". I'm sure there are many things that Paint Shop Pro can do, but I don't think using it as a browser would exactly be my first choice. Dragging My Computer to the Quick Launch bar is another way to bring up a browser, I suppose, or creating a shortcut to a folder there. But these are both workarounds for a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. XP did help a bit in that My Computer is in the new Start menu, but I've opted to change it to the more familiar Classic view, as many do.

XP solved that at least partially, but another thing that's been a problem for years is the way that Word can't see a file if it's in a directory other than My Documents that has a space in the name. (Suddenly allowing Windows users to have filenames with multiple cases and spaces in the names really caused nothing but problems if you ask me, because speaking from experience at TDC, when things with special characters are uploaded anywhere, you'll have no end of trouble trying to get them back down again.) The Word problem has existed since Word 95, and still exists in Word 2000. I'm not sure if it's been repaired in Office 2003 or Office XP. In fact, I'm not even sure if there is an Office XP.

This came up while searching for "Internet Explorer"+"Firefox" on Google. It sums things up pretty accurately (click for full size).

What else can I moan about? Here's a big one - Internet Explorer. Now, my understanding is that IE has improved immensely since the last time I used it, having been given popup blocking capabilities as well as having the tendency to eagerly download and install all incoming viruses and trojans removed. But it still lacks such standard features as tabbed browsing, and the way that its properties are so integrated with the operating system (you can't check your email in Outlook Express if your Internet Explorer is working offline) is just awkward. Not to mention that it leaves evidence of your activities all over the place even if you tell it to clear its history. In fact, other browsers are now considered so superior that anyone who admits to using IE seems to be discriminated against openly by the majority of Internet users. I'm not a huge fan of Macintosh's Safari, but it's clearly better than this mess. It would be slightly less detestable if there was even a way to remove it.

Outlook Express, which I mentioned a moment ago, is another thing that is being increasingly pushed out of the way by other email clients. I did try to change to Mozilla Thunderbird once, but it contains no HTTP mail support at all and is therefore largely useless as far as I'm concerned. Maybe if I ever untie myself from my Hotmail address and move to using my GMail one, I'll give it another try. But the point I was making is that Outlook Express is set up stupidly at first, with all attachments disabled - it implies that the average user is too stupid not to open any and all .EXE attachments that are sent, which does tend to insult the intelligence a little. The problem is solved by a quick look in the Options and checking the "Allow opening of attachements" box. Then having a much longer look and finding the "...But not automatically" one.

Even the simplest of applications can cause problems in Windows, though. Up until the release of XP (as far as I'm aware), Notepad, the resident text editor, caused no problems at all. The XP version, however, has other ideas. If you save a file while you're working on it - which I often do, given the sheer size of these rants - and go back and edit things, the words don't wrap correctly and you end up with gaps in your paragraphs. That can be solved by turning off Word Wrap then turning it back on again, but try and copy and paste the text that you've entered without closing and re-opening the file and you'll find that you've got ugly line breaks between all your lines. Why this problem started appearing after the program had been fine for years is a mystery.

File properties! That's another point. This is actually a curiosity shared by both sides of the argument. All files have three dates associated with them - the time they were created, the time they were last modified and the time they were last accessed. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but in order to get these dates, you have to access the file. Do you see where this is going? The "last accessed" date will always be only visible as the current time and date, because before the computer views the date, it has to access the file to get it and updates the date accordingly.

Even some of the new features of the later-generation Windows don't work properly. One of the most frustrating (because unlike many of Microsoft's "helpful" features, I haven't yet learned how to turn it off) is the way that it attempts to hide the menu items that you use the least. In reality, it seems that the selection of which menu items to hide is largely arbitrary, with Word often deciding to hide the Font menu while drawing your attention to the patently useless Autoformat feature. This problem also affects the Start menu, and when you try and add anything to the menu, only the most recently used directories are displayed as options. It's stupid, frankly.

While I'm on the subject of the Start menu, why doesn't it sort things by name, or at least give the option to do so? Every so often, to tidy things up you have to right-click on it and select "Sort By Name". It may seem like a very small point, but it's a lot more annoying than it sounds. I'm sure that Windows 95 was capable of it - why not anything else?

I mentioned the "recent usage" feature a minute ago. Add/Remove Programs tries to be helpful in pointing out the programs that you use the least, but at the bottom of the list under "Occasional" use are Microsoft Office and Firefox. Something isn't counting right, obviously.

And Media Player. This used to be a functional program (although the lack of obvious playlist support was a bit of a weakness) that simply played media, as you'd think the name would imply. Not happy with one of its programs being useful, Microsoft bloated the thing up to a CD copier, burner, media library, and countless other things including visualisations that, while nice to have, aren't really needed in a program that should just start quickly and play something. In fact, the original Media Player is still sitting there in case it's needed - go to Start/Run, and enter "mplayer2". However, this can't really compete with the almighty Windows Media Classic - a free download that can play virtually anything (including, crucially, RAM files) without the need for spyware-infested bloatware.

And it always is. So why create it again? (Admit it - you frantically clicked around this image to get rid of the Tooltip.)

Finally(ish), I've mentioned that Macs create entirely unnecessary directories and files before, but Windows isn't exactly innocent of that either. Periodically I'll go in to my My Documents folder and find little Sample Music and My eBooks directories, which might be useful if anyone in the world had ever read an eBook, for example.

And of course, Unix-based operating systems will always have one huge advantage over Microsoft's: the clever things you can do with the terminal. My personal favourite is the response from Unix when you ask it "If I had a ( for every dollar that George Bush spent, what would I have?". Go and try it, and you may never look at Windows again. Well, I suppose it's possible.

There, that should do it.