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Posted on November 27th, 2008 by Barry Collins
10 ways in which Windows thinks it’s being helpful but isn’t
Like a well-meaning Aunty who buys you a pair of slippers two sizes too small for Christmas, Windows has a number of ways in which it thinks it’s being helpful, but actually just makes things worse.
With the help of the PC Pro team, I’ve collated a top ten “thanks, but no thanks” Windows features:
1. How many times have you come back from a tea break, to find that Automatic Update has downloaded the latest Windows Patch and helpfully restarted your PC – taking any unsaved work with it – just because you weren’t in front of the screen when the five-minute warning started? Thanks Windows.
2. Plug in any new piece of hardware, and Windows will kindly volunteer to scour the web for the relevant drivers… and come up with precisely sod all 99% of the time. On the rare occasion it does find a driver, it’s normally generic software that cripples whatever peripheral you’ve plugged in.
3. Your firewall is turned off…. I know, I just turned it off. Do you want me to switch it back on? No I just turned it off. Okay, well here’s a little balloon just so you know it’s switched off. Grrr…
4. Install a new piece of software, and the Windows Start bar will turn an irritating shade of puce until you actually launch the program from the Start bar – even if you’ve ticked the option to install a shortcut on your desktop that renders the Start menu entry redundant!
5. You’ve inserted a disk, do you want Windows to: (a) copy the pictures to a folder on my computer; (b) print the photos (c) bugger off and leave you alone? Auto Play, please go away.
6. Windows Genuine Disadvantage. “Windows Vista has built in anti-piracy technology that enables Microsoft to combat piracy more effectively… This helps to make piracy harder and provides a better experience for customers running genuine Windows.” Erm… how exactly?
7. When you connect to a wireless network in XP you have to type the key in twice! Obviously someone thought “ooh, password, let’s make sure they enter it correctly, or, erm…” Fixed in Vista, thankfully.
8. Oooh you’ve inserted a USB stick into your computer. Do you want to check it for errors, do you, do you, pleeeease?
9. Install a new piece of software in Vista, and not only do you have to click through a box warning box asking you if you want to install the software, but another box asking if you want to install the software, thanks to the wonder that is UAC. In fact anything that faintly threatens to breathe on your Windows settings will provoke a UAC prompt. Thank heavens they’ve silenced it in Windows 7.
10. The Safely Remove Hardware prompt that doesn’t allow to you safely remove hardware if, something, somewhere on your PC is still mysteriously accessing the USB drive or you’ve left an Explorer window open – leading you to simply yank the damned thing out anyway.
17 Responses to “ 10 ways in which Windows thinks it’s being helpful but isn’t ”
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November 27th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
I have Vista on my laptop. When I try “Safely remove hardware” for my USB stick, it does not seem to work. In XP, the light goes out on the stick after I’m told it is safe. On Vista, no such thing happens. Does this no longer work?
November 27th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
I would say point (5) and (8) are redundant, are they?
I would vote for making it easier (faster & less painful) to kill not-responding applications/PID’s
Furthermore the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_removed_from_Windows_Vista
is good place to look for features that were actually helpful but have been removed – “fixed” in Vista.
November 27th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
How about actually finding the right device to safely remove….?
And has anyone ever actually screwed a USB stick by just unplugging once it’s finished accessing the files?
November 27th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Alex: Someone at the office had their USB stick wiped by not safely removing it.
Most of those you can turn off and as for point 2, you have to choose the setting for Windows to search the web. Not necessary as your new hardware will come with a driver disk.
November 27th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Safely Remove Hardware:
Doesn’t tell you anything useful!
If you have 2 sticks and an HD, it displays 3 x USB Mass Storage! Erm, which one is which?
November 27th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
that’s quite funny. I’ve never had the number 8 one though. Checking your USB stick for errors?
November 27th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
@TimoGunt:
[quote]that’s quite funny. I’ve never had the number 8 one though. Checking your USB stick for errors?[/quote]
I am assuming it is Auto Play feature combined with some (probably 3rd party) DiskChecker.
November 27th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Oh right my USB stick luckily doesn’t have any 3rd party software trying to take over
I’ve never used the safely remove USB thing either. I’ve never had any problems from just pulling it out. Had a lot of fun with the UAC thing though before I switched it off. It wouldn’t let me alter a .txt file because I wasn’t the administrator. I was swearing about it I must admit
November 27th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Three more.
Because your mouse-pointer slips off a menu item, the entire menu dissappears and you have to start all over again. Bah!
Tooltips that obscure what you’re trying to read.
Searching for ‘hidden’ system files or folders. leaving you to go and find it yourself.
November 28th, 2008 at 8:33 am
I have to admit that I’m usually pro-Microsoft. I think it’s a pretty tough thing to create an OS that supports everything that XP / Vista does and I’m not usally too bothered about other people getting a cutting edge feature in other software long before MS include it.
However last night (for the 3rd time) my Vista Ultimate 64-bit install finally became so slow and unusable that I had to wipe it again and start afresh. For ages it’s been getting slower to boot and occasionally it just hung a minute / two after you’ve entered your password, but last night it had finally become unuslably slow / unreliable. Remember that this is the 64 bit version.!!
I’ve tried the 32-bit version too (after the 64 bit one screwed up previously) and that was even worse, with blatent graphics glitches and no improvements in stability.
If this happens again now I will seriously revert back to XP. It will make my 4gb of RAM pointless, but probably still be faster and almost certainly more stable.
I’m dying to get Windows 7 installed and just hope that it really does remove all the crap and make a high-performance PC feel like one. Speedy boots please and minimal interuptions.
I left the house this morning with Service Pack 1 installing. So hopefully tonight I can restore data, re-install apps and work again.
Fingers crossed.
November 28th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Useful to be reminded why I switched to OS X / Ubuntu two years back…
I get my work done now!
I 0wn my computer, it doesn’t 0wn me!!!
November 28th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
yeah it’s just a shame you don’t 0wn any software to run on them
November 30th, 2008 at 11:54 am
I also use a Mac [and a PC] and could list a different load of annoyances, most of which you are stuck with. Unlike many of the ones above that can be turned off such as autoplay, balloons or are not an issue, e.g. removing ext drives compared to what a pain that is on a Mac.
Macs being quicker! Not necessarily. A job that would take me 25mins on the PC has currently taken over a day and is still not finished, due to Finder and the Macs simplistic, underpowered and clumsy file management. Not to mention Finder losing Hard drives at random.
December 4th, 2008 at 9:22 am
1. you really had a problem losing work after a restart? wow ok…. what were you working in, notepad? even notepad++ autosaves.
7. two boxes are annoying… but on the subject of wep keys, apple universally ignores the wep key length standard. id say thats more annoying. ‘must be 5 characters’… and you can enter more if you like. you can set up your airport to declare that 5 chars are required, but define more, confusing anything that adheres to the standard (ie. non-apple). thats more annoying imo.
December 4th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
What annoys me most about Windows is the insistence by everyone that programs for it on assuming that I am completely stupid.
Am I sure I want to close the application? Yes of course I bl**dy do, I pressed Exit(etc). If I didn’t want to and somehow accidentally clicked on that little hyperlink in the corner when I didn’t actually want to exit then that’s my error and I’ll take the consequences. But 99.9 times out of 100 I clicked it because i really had finished what I was doing and thus efficiency is reduced by the double check. Grr!
December 5th, 2008 at 12:56 am
Having more separation between Delete and Create Shortcut on the context menu would be nice.
It’s still far too easy to crash Internet Explorer with malformed content & unchecked scripts.
December 9th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
imajes: by the sound of it you are struggling with the Finder. Get PathFinder for OSX if you need to do Windows Explorer-grade large scale file management work on a Mac. http://cocoatech.com/ and V5 has just come out.
If I had to do any serious management of files on servers in the Finder in OSX, I’d probably fire up VMWare Fusion and do it in a Windows 2000 VM. It’s quicker… the limit is the idiot UI, especially keystroke handling. It’s not the file system: here my main file store is now a dual G5 XServe with an 850GB RAID5 volume on it. Not slow by any means…!
Steve