I was working on my laptop with someone on the phone for work and suddenly my PC became completely unusable. There was no task bar and every program would fill the entire screen. There were no ways to switch and no start menu. Just tile, acres and acres of tiles.
While talking I was scrambling to fix this mess. I finally just rebooted and when my desktop came up for a precious few seconds it switched back to this new shitty configuration.
Googling on my phone (while on the phone and trying to stall because I needed my PC for the call). I discovered this was probably Tablet mode and I should jut simply go to settings and tablet mode and turn it off. Well guess what, there were settings for Tablet mode but no on and off there.
Finally, and mostly by accident I found where I had turned it on. It was a button at the bottom of my notification screen I never even noticed was there. I must have slipped with my mouse and clicked it on. I turned it off and everything was normal again. I deleted that fucking button immediately and set the PC to never switch it on again (see that setting was under tablet mode settings but not a way to turn the fucking setting off).
Fuck Microsoft and their fucking useless tablet mode.
I stand by what I said. If you are going to have a mode that turns your PC into shit, at least make it easy to turn back or put a warning before it changes.
Did you read the whole OP? He turned it on by accident, was unable to turn it off, Googled how to do it and that didn’t help, and then only accidentally was able to find out how to turn it back off.
Even he was able to tell you about a better UI experience. Put up a little notification that you’ve changed to tablet mode, and allow the user to switch back immediately. If it’s the first time they’ve used tablet mode, prompt them before changing.
I would suggest also putting up info when you move the mouse, since the whole point of tablet mode is to be a touch interface, not a mouse one, so it’s a pretty good indication the user didn’t intend to be in tablet mode. It might also be useful to show a keyboard shortcut the first time you type with the keyboard–as keyboard are much less likely to be used in tablet mode.
There is a ton of stuff Microsoft could have done to not make this a frustrating experience for the OP. Instead, they allowed a complete change in how the OS interface works easily switchable without telling the user what they were doing. It’s crappy design, and the frustration it can cause is worthy of a pitting, IMNSHO.
Microsoft does lots of stupid shit. It smells like a comittee culture problem. When it forced an update on me from Windows 8.1 to 10 (when you keep refusing to update it eventually does it itself when you shutdown/restart) it changed my language from English to Japanese. Thanks guys, you probably know what I want more than I do. Then when I changed the language back to English it kept some of the menu items in Japanese because it couldn’t trust that I know what I want. It also turned my microphone input level down so much that Skype is useless.
The lesson here – if I may engage in an only slightly hyperbolic rant – is that Microsoft has been inflicting useless features on the world ever since they started “improving” Windows XP, the best OS they ever produced, and gave us Vista, which no one wanted or needed.* And the general syndrome of OS woes hasn’t gotten any better since. I’ve had to migrate to Windows 7, but only because it fixes problems of Microsoft’s own creation, like the fact that newer versions of .Net framework are no longer supported in XP, and some security certificates and protocols are no longer being supported. Otherwise every new OS since the real advances created in XP has consisted of useless and often counterproductive glitter and garbage which often break formerly solidly reliable legacy applications and offer little or nothing useful in exchange. IMHO. Also what BigT said.
The only utility of “tiles” at all, let alone your PC automagically turning into a tablet whether you want it to or not, is to help Microsoft flog their “PC-tablet integration” mythology and their “Surface” tablet garbage. I don’t want “tiles”, touch-screens, or tablet emulation because I don’t do serious computing by poking at the screen with my pinkie. I do own a real tablet and I use it to watch British sitcoms and surf the net in bed. </rant>
And while we’re on the subject, MS Office upgrades ceased being useful after Office 2003, which fixed a serious Outlook database limitation in Office XP. IMHO. Later versions mainly introduced the “ribbon” interface, a fantastic improvement that led everyone to say, “WTF? How do I do anything NOW? And what happened to the fundamental concept of object-oriented consistency in Windows?”
Bullshit. Like the OP I have a laptop. It’s not a touchscreen. It’s never going to be a touchscreen. I have zero use for a touchscreen based operating system.
But Microsoft wants me to buy their touchscreen based operating system. So they bundle it together with their keyboard based operating system and insist that if I want to buy the system I want I have to also buy the system I have no use for.
But I don’t have to buy a Microsoft system, right? Oh wait, it comes pre-installed on the laptop when I buy that.
D
