Most idiotic thing about Windows?

What is the most idiotic thing about Windows? I’m not a techie so I’m talking User Level here. I’m guessing on the tech level, a whole other thread could be started. And for me, Windows means Windows 98.

One of my favorites is the ScanDisk error message that reads: ScanDisk has restarted 10 times because Windows or another program has been writing to this drive. Quitting some running programs may enable ScanDisk to finish sooner. Do you want to continue receiving this warning?

What’s that you say? Windows has been writing to this drive?! WINDOWS?? The very program that is generating this stupid message? WINDOWS?? The only operating system on this computer? WINDOWS?? The operating system which ScanDisk is a part of. It’s been writing to my drive, DEAR GOD! How can I stop this?! What’s that? OTHER programs are writing to the drive also. Please, say it isn’t so! How could I have been stupid enough to load both Windows AND Other Programs on this computer. If only I had left it in the box it came in, then MAYBE ScanDisk would run. And yes, please continue to not work and throw up this error message for the rest of my life.

It turns out if you go to a newsgroup, or Microsoft Help Bulletin Boards or call the kid up the street, someone will eventually tell you what you REALLY have to do to get ScanDisk to run. Things like; ctrl+alt+delete everything but Explorer and Systray, and turn of anti-virus programs, and turn off your cable modem, ect. Since ScanDisk absolutely will not work UNLESS you do this stuff, you would think that Windows Help for ScanDisk would be a handy place to include this information. But no.

So, what’s your favorite idiotic Windows behavior? Include moronic error messages.

I think the most annoying thing about Windoze is that it seems to automatically post threads in GQ, which are so completely obviously opinion based.

I mean really. What is Bill thinking?

Oopps. Moderator, please move my OP to appropriate message board.

Jayrot, Windows didn’t post the thread in the wrong place. I did that. At least, that’s my opinion.

Who’s Bill?

<mutters something about people in glass houses>

Windows’ user-level behavior is actually well thought out, for the most part. If Scandisk told you how to use ctrl+alt+del, then thousands of users will call MS every day and say “I ended task on explorer and my computer crashed.” Windows has to be designed so as not to confuse a complete and total idiot, while allowing people to still do what they need to do. This is not easy.

Off to the Pit. Bwahahahaha!

Bwahattan? It just doesn’t sound right. Or, for that matter, rhyme.

Welcome to the world of multitasking. Windows is capable of doing more than one thing at a time. However, it isn’t sentient. Close any other (Windows) programs that might be writing to your drive. It’s not like that’s a difficult thing to do. In short, you’re whining and complaining about having to spend fifteen seconds to shut down a few errant programs.

As a Mac user, I’ve watched Windows grow up from the outside. There was so much wrong with Windows 3.1 / 3.11 that it was hard for us to believe that PC users considered it to be superior to the Mac. (On the other hand, before Windows, PC users had often considered DOS to be superior to the Mac.) Back then (in case it predates your PC experience or you’ve managed to forget), there was no icon on your desktop representing the place your files are at. In fact, since you also could not put programs or files or shortcuts to programs or files on your desktop, it would be fair to say that there was no desktop. What there was instead was a sort of bland useless screen on top of which windows would open if you selected them from a menu. The windows available in the menu – called “Program Groups” – were sort of little launchpad things for starting up programs in various categories (Games, Accessories, Microsoft Office, etc). These were not folder windows, where you were looking at actual files, so the only thing you could do once you’d opened one of these windows was launch one of the programs whose icon was in that program group. In other words, launching a program required opening a window from a menu, then double-clicking the program icon within the window. If you wanted to launch a second program, you would minimize the first one and find yourself staring at the open program group window, which you have no use for now that you’ve launched its program, so you’d close it and go the menu and pick another and then its window would open and you’d repeat the process.

File management was accomplished in a special program called File Manager, and once inside it you would discover that the hierarchy of actual files and folders (and filenames, including program file names) bore no relationship, really, to the set of categories in the Program Manager. In File Manager, icons were all pretty much generic little white things except for programs which, if I recall correctly, were pretty much generic little blue things. Despite its lack of decor, though, you could run everything from File Manager if you wanted, going into the folder containing the actual program you wanted to launch and then double-clicking the program file itself to launch the program. Most of us Mac users wondered why PC users ever bothered with the program manager and why they didn’t make the File Manager their “shell”. Maybe some did. Anyway, the File Manager, while not the dumbed-down yet user-hostile piece of shit that was Program Manager, would not remember the placement of icons if you dragged them around, so you could not organize your folders. You could do decent list views, but the next time you opened the folder it would not remember your viewing preferences and you’d have to set them again. There was another way to view your files, which was the tree, and the tree was cool, actually, a hierarchical menu of your drive with little + signs to expand or - signs to hide the contents of any folder. (Directory, they called them back then). The GUI to the tree view needed work, though – on a big hard drive with lots of subsubsubsubfolders it was very difficult to follow those vertical lines on the right and figure out where the heck you really were in the overall scheme of things.

Windows 95 was when Windows grew up, interface-wise. Windows 95 shitcanned the Program Manager and gave you a Desktop (a real one, you can even put files and programs there, not just shortcuts to them), a launching menu (the Start Menu), put a decent GUI onto file management and incorporated the hierarchy of files into the Desktop motif (the “My Computer” icon and within it the icons of the various drives), and cleaned up the messy window interface with elements borrowed from Unix X-Window and Apple’s Macintosh. Windows hasn’t really changed the fundamental GUI since. The XP universe is just the Windows 95 world with more orange and bigger text :wink:

Most idiotic remaining characteristics of Windows?

a) The program window. All document windows of a given program are enclosed by a program window, which means you can’t put a Dreamweaver project document between one word document (resized long and skinny and placed along your left screen-edge) and another (small and off to the right) and intersperse your Dreamweaver palettes and additional windows above and on the 2nd monitor and so forth. Instead, every bloody program is opaque to the documents of another.

b) Old-fashionedy file path based file identification system + the registry. An ideal OS doesn’t care if you rename folders, rename files (including application files), move them to another location (including another drive) or even boot from another bootable volume – it should still be able to launch and run the program. Not all of Macintosh reaches that ideal (some programs demand that their custom extensions be present under MacOS 8/9, and under MacOS X a few insist on being in the Applications folder of the startup drive, not to mention the native Unix binaries that won’t run if you move or rename anything that they need to reference) but the batting average is good. On Windows it’s pretty horrid. So under Windows you end up with a buttugly hodgepodge of foldernames and whatnot that you can’t organize because you can’t move or rename anything without breaking something. (Under the MacOS, we end up with a buttugly hodgepodge of foldernames and whatnot which are entirely of our own design ;))

But the PC has come a long way, baby. From DOS to Windows 3.x to Windows 95+, Microsoft has covered a lot of territory, user-experiencewise. I wouldn’t want to have to use it, but I acknowledge that the MS OS enduser experience is a serious and legitimate alternative to the MacOS enduser experience, with some good points (Open/Save/Save As dialog box access to files and file functions for example) amidst the bad points, and I think they deserve acknowledgment for that.

I discovered something interesting today. I was Spring Cleaning my hard drive (yes, my house is a mess, but I try to keep my hard drive crap-free) and decided to delete NetMeeting. It wouldn’t let me delete the folder, but I could go in and delete all the stuff in it. I left the window open and wandered away. When I came back…it had all reappeared. I tried it again, and emptied the Recycle Bin. All the NetMeeting stuff came back again. Weird.

XP Pro here. Love it, but that’s kinda odd.

I may have missed something between the first post and the last one but if advice is still needed regarding getting scandisk (of defrag, for that matter) to complete, a good way to ensure nothing is running is to start the pc (windows 95, 98) in Safe Mode.

I may have missed something between the first post and the last one but if advice is still needed regarding getting scandisk (or defrag, for that matter) to complete, a good way to ensure nothing is running is to start the pc (windows 95, 98) in Safe Mode.

The obvious one is still the fact that if you want to turn off your computer, you have to click “Start.”

"You can’t delete [or move, or rename] this file because it is in use by another program."

First off, why the hell not? Unix systems have been able to delete, move, and rename open files ever since computers were the size of refrigerators. NTFS, a file system with compression, encryption, and journaling–a file system so advanced that Linux can’t even write to it–should at least be able to handle this simple task.

Second, what program is using it? There’s no way to know! If it’s a video file, it’s probably only being “used” by the stupid Details sidebar. If it’s a folder, it’s probably the current working directory of some program, in which case the only solution is to close every program.

"Connection to Your ISP was terminated. Would you like to reconnect?"

Yes. Of course I would. When have I ever said no? Why are you wasting my time with this query when you could be reconnecting?

Folder layouts changing on their own

One of the nice things about the old MacOS was that each folder had a certain look, and it was always like that. Always. If it’s list view today, it’ll be list view tomorrow. If you put all your Word documents on the left side of the folder, and all your Excel documents on the right side of the folder, they’ll stay there until you move them elsewhere.

Not so with Windows. Every time you open a folder, it’s a crap shoot. Will my Word documents be on the left this time? Is it going to switch to tiles view or thumbnail view or filmstrip view? Weren’t these files sorted by date last time?

What the hell? Are you claiming that Windows can’t delete, move, or rename files?

Or are you saying that Unix systems can move, delete, or rename files while in use?

“Why is this stupid thing reconnecting! I didn’t want it to reconnect, I disconnected so I could make a phone call!”

In other words, there is no way for a computer to know what you want unless you tell it to.

That’s not true. Folders change when you tell Windows to change them (or if you have a virus, or authorized some other software to do it).

You can change all your folders to always display the same.

  • Open a folder
  • Use the view functionality to get it just the way you like it
  • Click Tools
  • Click Folder options
  • Click the View Tab
  • Click the Apply to All Folders button

Well, Win98 is five years old now. Win9x as a whole is dead. Move on.

What’s wrong with the registry?

Have you ever dug deeper into the guts of OS X? I mean deeper than the small subset of directories that the Finder lets you see? /lib, /private/etc, and so forth are just as much a “hodgepodge,” and God help you if you ever try to “organize” something.

And while we’re on “organizing”… what’s so bad with the way Windows does it? In the vast majority of cases, applications are installed in \Program Files*publisher name**application name*. Your “home” folder defaults to My Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos, etc. Per-user application settings should be kept in \Documents and Settings*username*. Seems pretty logically laid out to me.

Windows File Protection.

It isn’t NTFS. If an application has a write lock on a file, you can’t delete it. And before you ask “Why” again, keep in mind the number of inexperienced Windows users out there.

So you want it to be omniscient?

you definitely don’t want to use OS X. the OS X Finder is even more senile than Explorer.

Though I’ve never had the problem you describe in XP.

Technically, while I’ll be a PC user until the day I die and I love them to death, I’ll have to agree that Windows XP has this awful tendency of changing my folders to that godawful Tile view. I think I’ve recently gotten it fixed, but the problem was so sporadic before that I can never really be sure. :wink:

I think the most annoying Windows problem of all, though, is that it doesn’t automatically censor people that spell it M$, Winblows, and so on. What I wouldn’t give for that feature.

The most annoying thing (of many) to me is that the default director for a given application is not the last directory that was open. I am forever searching through hierarchies of directories in tiny little windows looking for files. Maybe this is fixable, but why is this the default setting??! Don’t they beta test?

Unix systems can move, delete, or rename files while in use. It’s not even particularly difficult to implement; it’s just missing in Windows.

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Jim Z *
**
What’s wrong with the registry?

**

What isn’t wrong with the Registry? If I went, systematically, through every possible thing that could be wrong with system configuration, adding fuckups as I went, I still don’t think I could design something that stupid. In particular:

[ul]

[li] It is an opaque format, rather than being human-readable text. Sure, you use the registry editor to view it, but suppose the problem is that your registry editor is hosed? Unix/Linux/OSX (to some extent) use text files, so you can use any sane text editor (or vi) to fix them.[/li]
[li] It uses cryptic syntax as if it were a security feature. This only makes it hard for people to hand-configure things correctly; it does nothing to stop programs from misconfiguring themselves by default.[/li]
[li] It allows installed programs to make system-wide behavioral changes by default, within their own configuration. This is just plain broken; it is indefensible. Were this not possible, spyware would go away.[/li]
[li] It conglomerates system information together, so there’s no way to set up sane atomic permissions.[/li]
[li] It is writable by default. Read than part again: It is writable by default. Given the above problems, this is utterly unacceptable. [/li]
[/ul]

Before you say anything, I’m an admitted Linux bigot. No need to point it out…