This … this is perfect.
Sincerely,
Merneith Family Tech Support
Wait.
Wait some more.
Maybe your file will show up.
Maybe not.
I use both every day and I couldn’t disagree more.
Sure, the OP could go through the extra work of learning to do something that Mac has solved, but why should she have to? It’s the 21st century for god’s sake, catch up Bill!
inb4 cuthulu
In vista, there’s a specific “downloads” folder where all the downloads go. For whatever reason, it’s nearly impossible to navigate to through direct up and down, but if you click on the little arrow before “Documents” in the bar while in My Documents, there’s a direct link to the Downloads folder.
Again, people, she’s using XP.
It’s a practical reason for them, not you. The Evil Empire has a long tradition of using the learning curve to lock in their customers. The way they do it is simple yet evil. They take established, widely used naming and organizing conventions and change them into MS-speak. They are always thinking of new users, and ways to make it as tough as possible for them to migrate to any other platform.
Another reason they randomly changed stuff from XP to Vista is because MS is basically out of stuff to sell. XP pretty much does what most folks need an operating system to do. This has been a problem for MS for awhile. In years past they tried bundling, the software equivalent of commodity dumping. Judge Jackson put a stop to that. Then they tried to force the desktop to migrate to the web (oh sure, we’d never look at your data that’s stored on our hard drives…). Now they are busily trying to force applications to migrate to the web, which may actually somewhat succeed. Get ready for your text editing to be metered by the minute. That’s the goal.
They’re not doing this shit to satisfy thunderous customer demand. They’re doing it in order to keep gouging cash out of you while still providing essentially the same services.
Linux.
What problem has Apple solved, here? Do they make it impossible to choose where to save a file, impossible to search for files, or some other “solution”?
Windows can be mildly frustrating, but I kind of like that. It makes me feel smart when I have to puzzle things out, even if it is usually just a matter of intuitive poking around.
You left out a ‘q’. It won’t work without the ‘q’.
I am not interested in poking around when I have things to do, which is why I use Macs as much as I can. I’ve been working on computers since 1985, thru all of the Windoze “upgrades” and now I’m trying to help my husband thru Vista (many of my reactions to what that does mirror the OP). Besides being far more durable and less likely to be infected, Macs are also more user friendly than the average PC. Their only downside is less software being written for them.
Extension? What’s that? Nobody told me about an “extension”! My new user manual didn’t say anything about “extensions”!? That’s only for computer geeks! 
As far as a Mac using only one button for the mouse, why do we need two? Why not three? I have five fingers on one hand, why not five buttons? Why not a random number to make it interesting?
(Just keeping in the spirit of the OP. You can ignore me now.)
Like hell they are. It was pretty hostile to simple folder navigation when I tried it. I had to dig through a bunch of options just to turn on the breadcrumb.
How the hell am I supposed to go up?
Hidden folders where another one. Why isn’t there any to view hidden folders without 3 rd party software?
And this is how I earn my crust. Thank you Mr Gates.
I have never had any hidden folders on any of my three Macs, nor have I ever had any trouble navigating folders.
OTOH, since I only have OS X 10.4, and therefore don’t have Breadcrumb, it’s entirely possible that things have changed radically between .4 and .5. I kinda doubt it tho.
Actually OSX has hidden folders. Either by Unix convention of . at the front of the file name meaning hidden which it got from it’s posix/unix core, the mac convention of a file listing files to be hidden, and I believe a third way as file attribute in a data fork like windows.
I learned all this trying to install a third party driver to get a usb wifi adaptor working (the owner wanted to connect a mac with an 802.11 G adaptor to a draft N router at N speeds). There wasn’t any official drivers but I found a third party driver that needed manual install. Which reuired going into a keys folder or something. IT’s been awhile and I forget.
The folder was hidden and I had to use a third party folder navigator.
Hum. So, there are hidden folders that have to do with how the computer works? I’d kind of expect those to be hidden from the casual user!
Oh yeah. I was taking a ms admin course about 10 or so years ago. The course emphasized on how much better MS was to its competitor Novell and gave examples of it comparing Novell 3.12 to itself (it wasn’t, btw). We had already been on Novell 4.1 for years by that point.
But what really set me off was that they called a printer a print device while in their vernacular the ‘printer’ was actually a piece of software that sat on a computer/server. Who the fuck calls a printer a ‘print device’? A printer is a piece of hardware. If you want to call your software something call them ‘printer drivers’ or a “print queue” like every other rational tech person on the planet. I vowed never to take another MS course ever.
I own a built-by-me XP system and I work on Macs all day. The time I spend in any one OS is probably divided 50/50. I have encountered diehard fans of each. What it really comes down to is whether you prefer an hourglass or a spinning rainbow pinwheel.
They’re hidden in Windows too. You just use the folder options to show them, rather than having to find a third-party program.
A lot of Windows rants sound weird to me, because I’ve been using Windows pretty much exclusively since I was 12, so the way the system works is pretty intuitive to me by now. Most of them are generally problems with the user not being familiar with the OS they’re using.