What are your Windows 'pet hates'?

HangTime

HangTime

HangTime

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Just curious as to what little nuances really annoy you about Windows. I'm not talking major flaws, bugs, or looking for general throwaway comments like "It sucks because it isn't as good as Unix/Mac OS/etc". I'm thinking more along the lines of, you know, stupid little things that are a bit trivial but seem unnecessary and get your back up.

Here's some of mine:

-Application windows that don't have Close as the bottom option when you rightclick them in the taskbar. E.g. the command prompt, that has 'Properties' there instead.
-Popup dialogs where you can't copy and paste the text directly (and sometimes they don't even show in eventvwr) so you have to type them out manually or take a screenshot.
-The Wireless polling that causes packetloss and can be a bit of a faff to disable
-The Vista clock requiring you to click through about 3458 sub-menus before you can actually adjust the date/time
-System properties dialogs (within device manager etc) that don't show up in the taskbar, so often the only way to find them again is to minimise all windows, and then click on explorer or something to get them to popup.

How about you?
 
Humm you've got me thinking about this one.

For xp I always was a little peeved at its inability to crash with dignatiy... Has been fixed in vista a bit by applications being allowed to crash without the need to completally reboot (or reload windows explorer some times) but it always bothered me that some thing osx (+unix) and linux can generally deal with.

I also agree with the wireless thing, sometimes it sort of breaks for no reason (especially after standby/hibernating).

Im not a fan of the difficulty making some programes look intergrated into the vista style (winamp is the big offender here) but thats not as such a windows based problem.

Urmm, the other weirdist one is when alt+tabbing to the vista desktop (or pressing show desktop) gets rid of the sidebar for no reason at all.

Also i dont really like the over reliance on the windows 95 style desktop, aka icons spreading everywhere (and the reliance on non-standard 3rd party apps to give it the dock style), as its very out-dated and cluttered along with relying on the old start menu to navigate around the system (as I see the mac solution to be more elegent, or the linux style command line to be more secure from idiots doing it wrong)

Other than those im generally a bit of a windows fan (though i like to play with linux and am looking forward to the osx day too)
 
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HangTime said:
-The Vista clock requiring you to click through about 3458 sub-menus before you can actually adjust the date/time
Click to expand...
you can do it in 3 or 4 clicks! (Its just UAC that gets in the way)

What really annoys me in Vista is the Unicode stuff you get in some context menus:

Unicode.jpg
 
That the recycle bin in Vista doesn't show how much is in it when you bring it up. I know you can select stuff and then it will tell you but why can't it just be there like it was in XP.

The popups that tell me that windows has blocked some start up programs... Yes I know already !
 
Hide extensions for known file types still being disabled by default. WHY?

Multi-monitor taskbar support - surely they can do something better than UltraMon/DisplayFusion.
 
selecting all the contents in a folder no longer shows you the combined file size (vista onwards)

microsoft not providing a central 'update service' for 3rd party applications
 
In XP (dunno about Vista, but will assume it's the same), the inability to add a folder to the left-hand pane shortcuts for save destinations. As I save 90% of things I work on in the daytime to various sub-sections of my "work" folder, it's a pain having to navigate through "my documents" first then to the specific work sub-folder. I'd love to replace the "desktop" "my computer" "my network places" shortcuts with the sub-folders I use most frequently (or even better, be able to change them from day to day).

If you can do it, I'd love to know how. If you can't then I don't see why I shouldn't be able to do this.
 
strumpusplunket said:
In XP (dunno about Vista, but will assume it's the same), the inability to add a folder to the left-hand pane shortcuts for save destinations. As I save 90% of things I work on in the daytime to various sub-sections of my "work" folder, it's a pain having to navigate through "my documents" first then to the specific work sub-folder. I'd love to replace the "desktop" "my computer" "my network places" shortcuts with the sub-folders I use most frequently (or even better, be able to change them from day to day).

If you can do it, I'd love to know how. If you can't then I don't see why I shouldn't be able to do this.
Click to expand...

http://melloware.com/products/placesbarv1/
 
bledd. said:
selecting all the contents in a folder no longer shows you the combined file size (vista onwards)
Click to expand...

That really annoys me about Vista + 7 :(
I even spent time trying to figure out whether it was my fault or not lol.

One of my other 'pet hates' has to be the stupid amount of Human Interface Devices in the Device Manager that pop up with a Microsoft Explorer Bluetrack Mouse. You can easily disable them, and lose no functionality, which makes you wonder why they are there in the first place :confused:
 
1. Gratuitous reboot requests when installing software.

2. Slow application of updates.

3. Fresh install footprint.

4. Inability to deselect optional components, due to an inflexible OS installer.

5. (Windows)Explorer randomly stops responding, even when doing something as innocent as right clicking an item.

6. White background for Windows Explorer. ( I want grey and can't seem to change it in 'Appearance'? )
 
Dano said:
Focus theft.
Click to expand...
Programmers should be shot for that!

I'm not sure which I hate most, apps which pop to the front without focus (therefore making you click at least twice to get the focus app back to the front) or apps/dialogs which pop up with focus while you're typing.
 
Yeah, focus theft annoys the hell out of my, busy typing away only to find half is writtin on some other window or i've hit enter just as it's popped up meaning I've said yes to something.

One major one for me is not being able to set a few folders as particular favorites. I work with a remote drive, and a few local folders and having to keep dancing around to get to various folders rather than being able to put them as one click type folders on the open/save dialog boxes annoys the hell out of me.
 
Pop ups when installing something, you are typing away and it goes onto the pop up so you're typing away on the pop up.
 
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