> Looks like a fairly even-handed criticism of various mis-steps > Redmond has made since releasing XP. Do you agree with these? Or can you > think of more deserving actions? > >http://www.zdnet.com/photos/a-decades-worth-of-windows-mistakes-that-changed-microsoft-for-better-and-worse/6321552
I think there are two big mistakes in Windows 7 (they may have been present in Vista but I never owned that OS and have very limited experience with it to date so I don't know). 1. Making it extremely difficult under some circumstances, and impossible under others, for a user with Administrator credentials to have absolute control over some aspects of the computer. I posted here a while back about a scenario whereby even if I took ownership of some files as an Administrator I still had to then explicitly grant myself "Full Control" over them before I could delete them. That's patently ridiculous. And related to that same situation, for some reason unrelated to any Windows Update, Win 7 suddenly stopped allowing a mail program to modify files that were part of that program when installed outside the C:\Program Files\ hierarchy. To fix the problem I had to move the files to the (normally hidden) \Users\Some user\Application Data\ hierarchy. To anticipate: Yes Stephen, I, as the OWNER of the computer, should be allowed to do whatever I want with any file installed thereupon, whether or not it's dangerous and/or stupid. This is a property rights issue. 2. In Windows 7 the file copying feature is seriously borked. (I know the problem started with Vista, in which M$ inserted all kinds of code designed to prevent users from violating copyright law when copying files. That code essentially deeply inspected every file being copied and in its first versions, slowed file transfer to a crawl. Although M$ eventually released a patch that speeded it up some, and later still the DRM scheme that M$ thought it was required to enforce was voided, file transfer remained slower than it was on all previous OSes.) In Windows 7, when I want to copy a folder that contains other folders as well as files to another computer on the network for backup purposes, here is what happens: 1. Windows 7 dithers for several seconds--sometimes up to a minute (this transfer always occurs between the same two computers and it's entirely random how long this initial step takes)--until it tells me it found a folder with the same name on the other computer and asks me if I want to copy to it. When I say yes, 2. Windows 7 dithers for several more seconds and then tells me that it found some large number of *files* with the same name on the other computer and displays about 150 words of questions about whether and how I want to copy these files. When I click on the overwrite option and also click an annoying little checkbox to indicate that I want it to overwrite ALL of them,... 3. Windows 7 proceeds to copy the files it found in the root folder that I'm copying. In my case, this is a few hundred files, so several MINUTES later, 4. Windows 7 pops up another dialog saying it found several *folders* with the same names inside the destination folder I'm copying to and asks me if I want to copy them over as well. Only after I say yes to this THIRD question about the SAME copy operation can I safely walk away from the computer, confident it will not ask me any more questions. This is absurd. The old "overwrite yes/no/all" question that used to pop up on every Windows OS since time immemorial was perfectly adequate; even if it discovered a read-only file and wanted to ask me about that separately, it would do so within a few seconds and then I could walk away and let a 10-minute copy job (that now takes 20 minutes with three widely-spaced interruptions) run on its own. Ken Dibble www.stic-cil.org _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
