I purchased a Hewlett-Packard laptop last November and ran into some major issues with it not long afterwards. After working my way through tech support and finally being placed with the highest level of support available, and after having the machine sent in three times to be repaired, HP finally decided to give me a replacement. Thankfully the replacement machine is much nicer than the original one, and I have been pretty happy with it. There are still some weird quirks that are annoying, but I have learned to deal with them and find work-arounds.

The thing that I did not like the most about the replacement computer is that it runs Windows Vista. I tried my best to get them to let me have XP instead, but according to the tech support person HP has stopped making drivers for XP for new hardware. Vista was the only option available. So, after getting the laptop and oohing at Aero, I started to notice some annoyances and issues with the new OS. Here, for your reading pleasure, is my list of top Winows Vista annoyances:

• The Automatic Discovery of Folder Type setting is not well implemented and not easy to change. It would be great if you could at least choose manually what template to use in a specific folder, overriding Vista's choice. A drop-down like the Views drop-down would be prefect. For now, I have disabled it with this great little command tool.
• Related to that, if I set a view setting on a window (Tile, Details, List, etc.), I expect it to stick, not for it to be overridden by Vista.
• Also, in Windows Explorer: in all the previous versions of Windows, in details view, clicking on the details to the right of the file name did not select the file. This change in Vista is annoying, especially when you want to move a file between two Explorer windows and the destination window has a lot of folders in it. Instead of the file being dropped in the main folder, it gets dropped in whatever folder you happen to be hovering over the details of. The only ways around this are to make the window wider, creating whitespace on the right side next to the details, or to be very careful to drop the file in between folders, which is tricky to do sometimes.
• The default color of a selected file in Windows Explorer is too washed out, and it is also not configurable, even in a non-Aero environment. I liked the previous Windows coloring (dark blue), which is very easy to see.
• One of the best utilities I had on my XP machine was Folder Size, a little tool that adds a column to the Details view in Windows Explorer that has the size of folders, not just files. The program does not work in Vista because Microsoft removed the IColumnProvider API. Regardless of that, this should be a default feature in Windows Explorer. Seeing the size of every resource in a directory is important.
• When I drag a file to an open application window to open it there Windows Explorer takes a long time to respond afterwards (20 seconds sometimes), not letting me select another file until it finishes thinking. I suspect this is an indexing issue, but whatever else it is, it is annoying.
• UAC is annoying for a power user like myself. I understand the security measures and agree that they are important, but when I am logged on as an administrator I do not want my every action questioned twice. I wish Vista would make a differentiation between actions resulting from a user activity and those not. That way, if I double-click on an installation program or try to open a Command prompt with Admin access I don't have to confirm twice that I really do want to do that. I have ended up turning off UAC because it was reducing my productivity too much and making me want to shoot my computer.
• Networking is still not improved over XP. If I put my computer into Sleep mode and take it from the office to home, or vice versa, I invariably have to reset the IP address manually to make it connect to the Internet again. Using the built-in "diagnostic" tool in IE7 does not always work, and sometimes the tool responds that it can't fix the problem at all—when all it needs is a refreshed IP address. (On a related note, why was the command changed from "ipconfig /release" to "ipconfig/release" (with no space) in Vista? It makes no sense to change a DOS command, and it took me weeks to figure out why the command was not working.)

Those are the things that come to my mind right now. Again, overall my experience has been okay, but these issues all add up and give Vista a bad aftertaste. I am actively considering witching to XP again, if I can get drivers for my machine.

Labels: Technology