Oddball Update

Over the last week, during which I have been extremely busy working with Windows night and day, I have repeatedly had the feeling that certain portions of this OS were designed by a bunch of toads.

I just did a search for some work-related files I haven’t used in a long time, because I need them again now. First of all, unless you open up Vista’s “Advanced Search” panel, you will only be searching in “Indexed Locations.” Query: Why does the concept of “indexed locations” even exist? If I want to search for something, that means I don’t know where it is. Either index the whole fucking hard drive by default, or just search everything by default. Why does the search system default to “indexed locations only” if Windows only indexes a tiny fraction of your data unless instructed otherwise? Why do I even have to waste time setting indexing up in the first place?

Okay, forget indexing. Let’s say you actually get some search results. You browse to a folder within those results, decide this isn’t the right folder, and then hit “Back.” You’d expect to be taken back to your search results so you can continue browsing, but oh no, Windows is too stupid for that. It can’t do anything intelligent like, you know, cache the results of your last search as long as the window is open. No, it has to repeat the stupid search all over again. Real efficient.

The process for making a copy of a file in the same folder where it already lives has gotten less convenient for me since Windows Vista. In XP, when you did that, the copy of the file would be renamed to “Copy of [original filename]” so that it did not conflict with the original file. Now, in Vista, the file gets named “[original filename] - Copy”. That in itself isn’t so bad, but here’s the worst part. Now, Vista alphabetically resorts the file list automatically, as soon as you perform any file operations like copying or renaming.

This makes it really hard to just do stuff quickly. Like, make copies of 10 files within a folder containing hundreds or even thousands. In XP, those 10 files would have appeared at the end of the file list in a nice group so you could rename them or mess with them in a contiguous unit. In Vista, as you start renaming them, they start zooming to whatever place in alphabetical order they belong, and the view scrolls with them, so you have to keep going back to where the rest of the copies are. And don’t even get me started about unzipping a file into a folder where other files already live. The zipfile contents, which formerly would also appear in a nice group at the end of the list, now get sprinkled alphabetically all throughout the list. RAGE!

But my absolute favorite Windows stupidity crisis is the one where the OS will conveniently forget the view settings you wanted for a particular folder. Yes, this is STILL HAPPENING in Vista, and it’s been happening since Windows 2000 if I remember right. You know how this goes: You expect all of your folders to display in “List” view, and then one day you go into a folder that you go into a hundred times a day, and suddenly it’s in “Tiles” view for no reason. Because Windows has ostensibly “run out of memory” to store all the folder customizations. Except that I didn’t customize any of these folders, I just changed all folders globally to display in “List” view until I set otherwise. Are you telling me that this sets a customization on every folder in existence? And is it so hard to dynamically adjust the allotted memory space for these customizations so that it, you know, never runs out? It’s not like I don’t have dozens or even hundreds of spare gigabytes on my hard drive. Why can’t Microsoft just fix this shit?

Gah. Sorry, had to get that out.

Tagged as Rants, Windows + Categorized as Computers, Rants