But WordPad does not open .doc files with “too much” Office formatting and any Office .doc created after 6.0 almost always has “too much”.
The fact that Windows XP refuses to acknowledge I have 4Gb of ram in this machine. I mean really, if they could patch Windows 2000 to recognize large disk support, why can’t they upgrade XP to accept more than 3Gb of ram?
Oh fucking testify. What annoys me further is that I’m sure there’s a “shut your cockhatch, idiot machine” tickbox somewhere for this sort of eventuality, but I refuse to look for it because I keep telling myself that Vista is just a temporary measure until I back up those million bad photographs and huge chunk of albums that I don’t like and run screaming to Ubuntu, and I’m not snouting around in the frankly remedial interface like someone who wants to work with Vista, because what would be the point? Don’t you know who I am? And I’ve said this since 2007 :smack:
The Add/Remove Programs list in XP, that takes about two minutes to open every damn time you use it. Why does it have to rescan every time? Couldn’t it save the list somewhere?
Thirded or fourthed on the stealing focus/foreground. Windows does provide an official mechanism for this, AIUI - the flashing taskbar thing. But I have heard that developers like to be able to steal foreground and/or focus, because otherwise they get too many support calls from users who are not so comfortable with switching applications and think that the application has disappeared.
So Windows lets the developers do that if they must, and it seems most of them feel they must, the bastards. Including MS’s own application teams.
Because the other memory is being reserved by hardware, long before Windows gets anywhere near it (Ubuntu is currently reporting 2.9GB out of 4 to me, just as Vista did). There’s a good explanation here: Ask Dan: What's with the 3Gb memory barrier?
Ah yes. And also how it either incompletely removes all of the folders/traces when removing a program, or how it incompletely lists what actually is installed, or how it can’t handle a program deleted by other means (like an uninstaller from the program menu folder) and tells you it can’t delete what you’ve already deleted.
And the add/remove hardware. “Please insert Windows disk or driver disk, or just let it search the internet for you?”…has Windows ever found a driver on the web by itself? Ever?
XP: Those goddamn system tray bubbles. Yes, I know I have unused icons on my desktop. I don’t care. Yes, I know I just sent something to the printer - that’s what the whole ‘file -> print select printer click “OK”’ thing was all about. Go away.
And also bonus jab at IE, because that kind of counts: I swear, I once got a dialogue box in IE asking me if I’d noticed the little info bar at the top telling me that IE had stopped a popup or something. It’s like a little kid trying desperately to get his parent’s attention and love.
OS X: I agree with the complaints about the wonky window resizing, and I do wish that they’d adopt a more Windows-y ‘click any edge of a window to resize’. Especially if I open a bookmark in a new tab in Firefox and it automatically resizes the window.
They did. That’s what 64-bit Windows does.
Mandriva Linux here, both at home and at work. My only beef is the lack of a decent email AND calendar combo client that’ll work wtih exchange. I get by with Thunderbird & manually adding everything to my calendar.
Generally speaking, I like Mac OS/X, but there are a few little things that drive me nuts. One is that I want to be able to resize windows in a single step. If there’s a window in the lower-right corner of my screen, I want to grab the upper-left corner to resize, not move it, resize with lower-right corner, realize it needs to be just a bit bigger, move it again, resize again… This especially shows up on my two-monitor system. It seems that every time I go to the view with the big pictures and hit the sorry excuse for a maximize button, the window gets taller than the screen. A real maximize button would be nice.
This drives me nuts. I was an operating systems programmer in the late 70’s, and we had a better mass filecopy back then!
Not that I know of. I use both Windows and Mac OS/X, and the driver handling on Windows is the single biggest thing I detest. Last year, I got a new Mac and my wife got a new Windows machine. Everything (printer, camera, memory cards, iPod, wireless mice…) that we plugged into the Mac just silently started to work. No dialog boxes, no alerts, no announcements. Just worked. The Vista machine took me six damned hours of searching the Web, loading drivers, and tweaking settings.
Of course, the OSX “maximize” non-existent button. But also the “dodge the Dock” game you play if you want to do something at the bottom of the screen.
Windows XP-64 makes me BURN with the fury of 1,000 suns.
The absolute WORST piece of shit I could possibly imagine. I built my system 3 years ago and thought, “Hey, I have a 64-bit processor, lets get the 64-bit OS. Couldn’t be that bad, right?” I’d be GLAD to have my old Windows ME, back over this piece of shit. That’s how frustrating it is.
So far, due to lack of support I’ve had to return two printers, returned two wireless cards, and only got my THIRD wireless card working because some programmer hacked the driver for it. The driver for iTunes won’t work, so I can’t hook up my iPhone. I currently have a stack of about $150 worth of software that I can’t return because it’s opened, and can’t install because it doesn’t support 64-bit.
So I decided I’ll upgrade to Windows 7 when it comes out. It’s been getting pretty good reviews, even from the geeks I know.
Anybody want to guess what happens when I try to install the “Windows 7 Advisor” to see if my system’s cut out for it?
My main problem about OSX is the poor selection of computers it comes on. You’ve got a miniature novelty computer, an all-in-one that has a crappy screen if you choose the 20", and a workstation that is so expensive that it’s not even relevant to the discussion.
I hate how skinny the scroll bar is, making it hard to find it with the mouse. The only way it works it if you position a window so the bar overlaps the right edge of the screen.
Also, no matter what Finder window I do a Spotlight Search from, it searches my whole hard drive. I’d prefer it to search only the directory I’m in, unless I use the menu item in which case it could do a global search. Also, it starts searching as soon as you start typing, so if I type a little slowly my computer will go apeshit finding every file with the letter ‘s’ or some such.
You can search just the directory you’re in if you use the search field in the finder window. When you run a search in that field, there are options for just that directory, the whole drive, and more. Assuming you’re using Leopard. And, don’t you use a scroll wheel? 
My bitch about OSX is when browsing in column mode in a finder window, the columns don’t automatically adjust their size to the longest file name. I’m constantly having to mouse down to the little || icon, and double click it to expand the column fully so I can read most of the file names.
It’s command-down. It makes sense because if you’re navigating with the keyboard, command-up takes you “up” a folder level, and command-down takes you “down” a folder level, unless you’re highlighting a file, in which case it takes you “down” into that file.
Everyone has done a great job so far of keeping the thread from devolving into a fanboy pissing contest, so I hate to start anything. But this confuses me a bit: what’s wrong with the notebooks?
As for my complaints.
OSX
[ul][li] No matter how I fiddle, it can’t deal automatically with proxy networks. Whenever I go back and forth between campus and home, I need to click through five dialog boxes to get the internet working.[/li][li] Not really an OS problem so much, but Mac version of Office applications are extremely buggy. [/li][li] Some of the settings are hard to get to. Try changing your dock without using Terminal and several hidden folders. [/li][li] While I love the dock, and I love my screen corners, I do find myself doing the mouse dance around the bottom and corners of the screen to avoid activating these features. [/li][li] The lack of a true “maximize” button bothered me at first. I guess I’m used to it now.[/li][*] The registry, and the driver scheme. Oh wait. No, it doesn’t have those problems.[/ul]
I’m going to be a contrarian and say I dislike the zoom feature on Windows. Full screen might make sense for a tiny fraction of programs, but in most apps I’ve got a letter-sized document, web page, or photo open. Zooming to cover the whole bloody screen is just wrong: open to the size of the document. I didn’t buy these multiple large monitors so that I could look at one window at a time.
But I’ll be the first to admit it pales in comparison to the Windows multi-file copy bugs people have already mentioned.
For Linux (I’m a cross-platform developer, so I spend about equal time on each OS) it’s the insane steps you have to go through to get slightly-non-standard hardware (such as, say, any video card developed since 2005) actually working.
And for Mac, it’s a much subtler thing: I hate the modifier-drags on files in the Finder: they change based on whether you’re dragging to another physical volume or not, which is often something I don’t know at the moment. I much prefer the Windows “right-drag with a context menu at the end” option…which can’t be implemented on the Mac because the Mac puts up context menus at mouse-down rather than mouse-up.
Command-Return works for me, too, which is closer to the original request. But I’ve got several apps that might be modifying shortcuts, so it may just be my system.
Do you know about “Locations?” Create one that works for each location, then select the right one from the Apple menu: it’s just one step each time you change - proxies, adaptor order, IP addresses, etc. all included!
I use this to go from my day job’s pathological corporate network to home and back again daily. Takes a few seconds (5-10) to make the change, but works every time. I wish Windows had this feature.
Yes, dammit, yes.
It’s especially annoying when the program in question is Windows, trying to generate a thumbnail. The thumbnail generation is handy, but not well implemented.
The nannying also bugs me - I wish I could figure out just how Windows decides which executable files get the ‘this might damage you system*, are you sure you want to run it?’ message - it seems positively random, and can only be turned off on a case-by-case basis - the check box is ‘always ask this for this file’ not ‘this type of file’.
- Because it’s an executable…it comes up whether or not a virus scan has been run on the program, so it’s not ‘oh, no, virus, don’t run this!’ it’s ‘hey, you’re an idiot who doesn’t know about viruses, so I have to remind you every time that any executable file might, actually, be a virus’
Spell checkers really help you with your writing troubles if you take note of your errors. So do grammar checkers. Did you know there’s a difference between “then” and “than”? Or even that there’s a word “than”?
I didn’t till awhile ago.
An acknowledged shortcoming in Linux, but let me shed some light on that one.
iPods are proprietary, which means it is up to the developer (Apple) to release their syncing mechanism and code to the public. Unfortunately, Apple prefers to do all of their coding in-house and would not release their code to the public. This means that while they have applications for syncing iPods to Macs and Windows computers, Linux machines are left out.
The only solution is reverse-engineering the code, and that’s similar to trying your hand at a shooting range while blindfolded.