Generally speaking, one of the things I like about Windows is the fact that you can do everything with the keyboard. Don’t get me wrong – when it comes to drawing pictures and such, give me a mouse any day. But when all I want to do is launch a program or select a menu item, I find hitting a few keys a far simpler and more efficient way of doing so. (This, in fact, is one of my major gripes with Mac OS X – but that’s a rant for another day.)

What I don’t like is what happens when some requester leaps up while I’m typing and steals focus from the window I was typing into.

It’s not just the sheer rudeness of the interruption, though that’s obnoxious enough. The big problem is that – well, call me bourgeois, but when I’m typing I sometimes like to hit the space bar between words. And I type fairly quickly, and I don’t always look at the screen as I’m doing so; and so, when a requester suddenly leaps to the fore, I frequently end up hitting the space bar before I’ve noticed it.

The requester, of course, knows nothing and cares less about what I was doing before it appeared. Thinking only of itself, it presumes that my pressing space must constitute carte blanche for it to launch immediately into whatever idiotic behaviour some dullard thought would make a good default action… and lo, my computer is away and there’s no telling what might happen.

It’s particularly annoying when it’s IE7 telling me a download has completed. Never mind that already, right at the start of the process, I clicked the button to run the application after downloading. Once it arrives, Internet Explorer interrupts me with a second requester asking the same question again – and, in flagrant disregard of the decision I have already indicated, the default option is ‘don’t run.’

And so, when, as is inevitable, I inadvertently ‘choose’ the default option, the requester simply closes. Cue a lengthy search of my hard disk for the installation file, which generally turns out to be in a hidden directory buried eight levels down from the root, with a forty character name that’s just a string of hex numbers.

Sometimes I think we should go back to QDOS. No multi-tasking, no directories. Just think of the productivity gains.