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Microsoft Blog

These are things that I've come across all on our own, and I assume that everybody at MS uses MS products, so you'd think they they would have banged their heads against this stuff and would have gotten around to fixing it all! Of course, the economics of the situation dictate that they must spend more time and energy (and presumably better reward those working) on "New Features!" which only serve to make the whole thing more convoluted, bloated, broken, and annoying. But it sure does make the stock rise (or not, ha ha ha). Money is the bottom line, and I don't like that. They should just add a default Help entry for all their stuff: "Why does <application name> suck so much poop?" These have been gathering here for many years, so toward the bottom are lots of things that are probably no longer quite valid. Like, they've been 'fixed' with new and even more broken 'functionality'! Apologies in advance for all the typos and grammar problems and things. I've stopped trying to copy-edit this list because it is just too darned long.

A reader sent in this note: You might want to check out "Outlook Annoyances" from O'Reilly. They have a bunch of fixes for a lot of little problems.

These days, I'm mostly running Win XP. Also, I moved from VS6 to Visual Studio 7/.Net and it is killing me so I started a separate list for all that.

• 927) Here I am in the year 2007 cursing such basic tools as streaming internet video: I left a windows media format lecture on pause for a while and when I return and press play it never starts playing. And, as a kicker, it doesn't give any UI feedback for what it is/n't doing so I have no way of knowing WTF is going on. That's quality with the Microsoft touch.
• 926) I love how Outlook searches from the oldest items to the newest, when in fact 90% of the time I want to find recent email. So I have to wait for it to go through all sorts of useless stuff before getting a result, if any. And, there doesn't appear to be a way to tell it to search the other way 'round. (I'd hazard a guess that they store things in some linear file so they pretty much have to search in that order, which is just mind-bendingly lame. If they don't have such a restriction then I don't understand why their UI is so explicitly designed to suck.)
• 925) I minimize a Notepad window. I then Alt-Tab and... I'm back in that Notepad instance. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Stooopid!
• 924) I am more in the static typing boat. So it drives me nuts when Type.GetType() takes a string which could be "classname" or could be "classname, assembly". Utter API crap, hate.
• 923) The problem with VS project and solution files is that they are large and it is hard to know what in them is actually important, should you ever need to move outside of VS (e.g. towards makefiles, or even to go from 2k5 to 2k3). I guess the same thing can be said of any build system, but the ones that have all the XML overhead are particularly painful to me.
• 922) Outlook suck: I'm trying to get rid of buttons to make space, but one of the buttons is a full sized "more buttons" button which I can't get rid of, so there's basically always this entirely useless-to-me part of the screen being taken up by that. Genius!
• 921) Another fun example of Windows usability suck: I create a new folder, and then I rename it. Then, I "cut" files from that same parent folder (not from the new one, since obviously there is nothing in that new one). The files change color. Then, I realize that I don't want them cut, I want them copied so I can paste them into the new folder as backups, so I can safely edit the originals. So I type Ctrl-Z thinking that will undo the "cut" but... instead the new folder reverts to being called "New Folder".
• 920) Why yes, this does suck. Especially when mixed-in with folks who willy-nilly used VS2k3 and VS2k5 without realizing the possible trouble (easy mistake to make, don't blame the user, blame the original developers at MS).
• 919) I love how in Windows XP the Command Prompt application doesn't use Windows XP window controls; I guess it is using some set of widgets from Win95 or something. The kicker is that I am using multiple monitors and wanted to use a utility that inserts a widget in the window title bar to let you move a window between desktops with a single click... and that utility doesn't work with the Command Prompt window, which happens to be the only one I cared about. Yes!
• 918) The hard disk on a machine fries, so I have to put in a new disk and completely reinstall Windows XP. I'm lucky that I have written down the activation code for that version somewhere. However, when I get into the fun new "Windows Genuine Advantage" bull-crap, it fails with the following super friendly and helpful message: "You have encountered an unknown error." Not "We", "You". How nice. If this machine were not for somebody else, I would have burned all of the MS stuff into ash and installed Ubuntu.
• 917) It seems to me (I haven't been able to figure out how to force it to repro one way or the other) that mixtures of docking, undocking, and rebooting this Dell laptop results in different screen DPIs being chosen - the screen is pretty high-rez, and so sometimes when I login I see larger fonts (what I want) and other times I see super tiny fonts (I think the default 100% scaling rather than the 125% I want).
• 916) OK, I don't know if it is Windows or Dell to blame, but: I love how when I have my laptop hooked up to a 2nd monitor and then use the laptop's keyboard shortcuts to adjust the brightness of the laptop screen, the brightness UI appears on the other screen. Whatever!
• 915) Nice that MS Windows doesn't let you set the Clear Type choice per display. I mean, what if I have my laptop display and then a CRT as an attached other display? Does Clear Type figure that out and do the right kind of futzing on each display?
• 914) It bugs me that there is no "raise" or "lower" command for windows under MS Windows. You can only have something brought to the very top, or completely hidden with one command. Lame.
• 913) Microsoft still doesn't Get It when it comes to usability. I made a very small spreadsheet in Excel on my super fancy new Dell D810 that has a 1.73 GHz Pentium M, and 2 GB of RAM. The spreadsheet was all text, with no formulas in it at all - maybe 5 columns by 4 rows in all. I selected the 4 rows and copied the selection, then quit the program... and got a dialog box saying that the clipboard data was large, and asking if I wanted the clipboard contents to be retained or forgotten to save memory. WTF!?
• 912) "Automatic Updates is turned off." Apparently, so is the grammar checker.
• 911) The spell check feature in Outlook Express quickly annoys. Rather than showing me one error at a time, which immediately makes me mad because 9/10 things it flags are perfectly fine technical terms, I think it should be like the unix utility 'spell' and show me a list of erroneous words (in some non-suckful, interactive, useful, UI) so I can quickly check things rather than have to go through some hateful click-click-clicking. So, in the end, I tend to just abort the spell check every time. (Yes, I know, I could be a good anal citizen and update the dictionary in the current UI and that way hope to get it down to showing me only real problems, but that is actually more work than I want to do - I think the UI should be good enough that I don't have to do lots of extra work to train the program.)
• 910) It kills me how dialog boxes for MS products won't let me select and copy out important information.
• 909) Progress, as measured by Microsoft: making Windows XP take even longer to just bloody shut down. And, having the possibility of all sorts of choices I have to make during the shut down process just to get the bloody thing to shut down: there have been times when I've told it to restart and gone away and come back later assuming it would, you know, have actually restarted, only to find some bloody dialog box telling/asking me something stupid, and preventing the system from doing the actual restart. Great. Wonderful. Terrific. (Similarly with my Dell laptop, you can tell it to hibernate but sometimes it doesn't get into hibernation before you close the lid, so when you open it much later, rather than waking up it actually resumes going into hibernation. Ha ha. Ha. Whimper.
• 908) Outlook Express didn't seem to have a way to forward an Address Book entry. I had to right-click on it, then copy-and-paste it into an empty message. It pasted the entry as "John Doe E-mail address: jd@foo.com" and then when I sent the letter Outlook marked "e-mail" as questionable spelling. It is great that Outlook can generate text that it doesn't even like itself.
• 907) At this rate, Apple will replace MS, kinda like how MS replaced IBM, within five years.
• 906) I don't know if it is Windows or Spy Sweeper to blame, but Spy Sweeper puts up little informational text in baloons, emanating from its Tray icon. Of course, in a brilliant display of utter usability genius, these baloons steal the keyboard focus.
• 905) It is almost as if Adobe and MSFT are in bed together: Microsoft Automatic Update wants to install a patch for Flash. However, it constantly fails to install. But it still tries to be installed every time I turn off the computer. So that's a nice waste of my time. I downloaded the fix and ran it directly and it put up a dialog box saying that the version of Flash I have on the machine is incompatible with the patch. Yet, the patching system keeps trying to patch it. And I don't realy feel like having to go update Flash so the conclusion to all this is obvious: turn of Automatic Updates. Boy, do I hate everything.
• 904) You just can't win, especially when you are trying to use Windows FS with some unix target. I'm trying to scp a file from NTFS to a remote linux machine, and the file ends in ".PNG". So I want to change it to ".png" first because the all-upper-case extension looks stupid. Well I get "`trac_clickable.PNG' and `trac_clickable.png' are the same file" of course. (I know, I know, I can just rename it in the scp command line.)
• 903) Why does everything always have to suck? Windows Media Player will play the videos off of my digital camera and then when the video is done, it resets the view to the first frame of the video rather than leaving it on the last frame. So the final thing that happens while you are watching is a jarring change in the image to something unrelated to what you were just watching a split-second ago. It doesn't take a super genius to see this is broken behaviour and that the system should simply leave the final image up on the screen at the end. I just don't comprehend how things like this get shipped. (Well, OK, I've been through enough product shipments to know exactly how things like this get shipped, but I still have no respect for humanity.)
• 902) (I love how installation wizard dialog boxes keep forcing themselves to the fore while I'm trying to type in this entry. Everybody sucks.) It kills me that I cannot have more than one sort parameter in the Details view of the File Explorer. I want to first sort by Type, and then sort by Date Modified. But, nooooo.
• 901) Fundamentally, Project sucks because it can lead you down some road from which you cannot recover - or at least it is not obvious how to recover. Maybe if they could add something similar to Photoshop's History list that might help? Whatever, Project sucks.
• 900) The depth of my hatred for Windows XP knows no bounds. All I want to do is be able to run (x)copy in a command shell to copy from my USB attached digital camera to my USB attached storage device. The latter shows up with a drive letter. The former... does not. The camera has no drive letter assigned, it is just called "Canon PowerShot A400" in the File Explorer. I've looked in the hardware device listing, I've right-clicked on the camera and gotten Properties, yadda yadda yadda, and yet I still have utterly no clue how to get to the files in the camera from the shell. This is utter insanity. I hate everyone.
• 899) Project interprets the mouse wheel in different ways depending on what small mode it is in. Sometimes when you use the mouse wheel the entire view scrolls up and down. Other times (a single click in the spreadsheet view can cause the mode to change) the mouse wheel causes the selected cell coordinates to change - you are moving the cursor rather than the view in that case. It is stunningly infuriating.
• 898) I love how the printer queue dialog box has a field for the printer status that is empty, but the title of the dialog box says that the printer is out of paper which, in fact, it is. I mean, why would you want to have the actual status field reporting status?
• 888) Printing from MS Project is hell.
• 887) On this Dell D810 laptop, Windows will put up a new kind of dialog box saying things about the status of the laptop - things like "your internal ethernet has been disabled to save power" or whatever. These dialog boxes are a new kind in that they do not have any close box or anything. The problem is that, apparently, as far as I've seen, these dialogs can take focus away. So I'll be typing my password in somewhere and some laptop status notification dialog will appear and my focus will be lost. Lost to something that doesn't even take input!
• 886) Now I'm in MS Project heck. There's too much suck about it to really explain it all, but here's a tip-of-the-iceberg example: I have two projects open, but there are three entries for Project in the Alt-Tab list. Two of those three display the same project when selected.
• 885) Another really nice feature of PowerPoint is how it gets stuck in superscript mode. I end one line with a date like "April 1st" which automatically gives me "April 1^st". I then hit Enter to start a new line of text... and the dumb-ass program ^{is still in superscript mode} until I manually get it back to regular formatting. Genius!
• 884) The little widget for setting the font size seems stupid to me. It consists of two areas: one is an area where you can type in the font size number, the other is a little button which produces the drop-down of pre-defined font sizes. The text area is at least twice the size of the drop-down button, if not larger. The kicker is, obviously, that I literally never want to type in a font size, I have only ever wanted to pick something from the font size list. So I am stuck having to target the smallest area. Talk about giving me Fitt's.
• 883) I love how all my slides are a certain color scheme and I go to add a new slide and... it defaults to black-on-white, which is not my color scheme. So every bloody time I make a new slide I have to laboriously go in and set the color scheme to match all my other slides. Genius. (The kicker? It just decided to start applying the color scheme. So it is apparently pretty random when it will and when it won't. That's quality you can bank on!)
• 882) The system for applying and editing color schemes is an incomprehensible nightmare, in several ways. One eample: I'm trying to make my own scheme based off of a default one, and then play with that scheme. Every time I make a change to my scheme the program creates a whole new scheme, so I have this long trail of old schemes I don't want.
• 881) PowerPoint lets you set the Line Spacing. I bumped it up to "1.5 Lines". Later I went back to experiment with it again, and was kinda confused to see that the dialog box now said the line spacing was "1 Lines". Apparently it had reset its world view so that what used to be 1.5 was now just 1. Personally, I think that is insane. The kicker here is that if I played around with line spacing the second time, the formatting algorithm appeared to go insane and would end up with non-uniform spacing between lines. Utter insanity.
• 880) All I'm saying is, PowerPoint supposedly tries to let you type your slide text directy in the Outline frame. However, the behaviour and interaction mechanism is completely non-standard (doesn't work remotely like Word's Outline) weird, strange, incomprehensible, and just plain evil.
• 879) In PowerPoint there can be many sub-windows or frames open. Right now, I've got the "Search Results" for Help on the right, a picture of the current slide in the middle, and the Outline on the left. I am trying to look through the Search Results on the right. I have the cursor there. As I move the cursor over things in that frame, they get underlined so obviously the program knows I'm looking there. However, if I use the mouse wheel to try to scroll that frame vertically (it has a scroll bar), it doesn't move. Instead, the Outline area moves.
• 878) I get to use PowerPoint. I wanted to have slide nubmers like "n/m" at the bottom of each slide so my audience would have a rough idea of how far through the talk I am. PowerPoint does have an auto-numbering feature, but it only shows "n". Great. Thanks. How useful for my purposes. The kicker is that it has an option "Don't show on title slide" which I turned on, but I still see a number on my first slide. Nice.
• 877) It is 2006. I'm running the latest version of Widows XP Pro. And still the bloody system can't handle multiple readers and writers to the filesystem gracefully, even when they are writing to different places. What! Ever!
• 876) I love how I try to print something from MS Word and it puts it in the queue, then it says there was an error and it failed to print, then the queue says "Error - printing" and then the printer prints the document. Impressive! Also, I set it to print double-sided 4-up to save resources and it takes each page like 45 seconds to process and print. Nice negative reinforcement to the ecologically minded user.
• 875) The little things kill me, like how Microsoft Update says "downloading" and "preparing for download" at the same time - what is it actually doing? It jumped from "preparing" to "verifying" which makes it look like "preparing" was actually really downloading. Whatever.
• 874) I'm having trouble with DNS, so I want to know how to clear the DNS resolver cache. Help & Support locks up when I try to search for "dns". Apparently, it is set to look in the remote, online Knowledge Base - and it is getting locked up trying to contact that, is my guess. Freaking genius.
• 873) I love how quitting Outlook Express doesn't really quit it, and a minute later I get two dialog boxes from it telling me that it couldn't connect... that's why I was trying to get it to quit in the first bloody place.
• 872) I haven't found a way to do this in Excel: force it to paste text in a font style that I want, and never in the font style from which it was copied. This is killing me; every time I paste something I have to go back and reformat it to the font and size and style that I want.
• 871) The list of detected wireless networks scrolls in a completely freaking insane way: there are two networks off the bottom of the list, so I click in the scrollbar to "page down". Rather than showing the list scroll up two entries, the entire thing goes into some one-armed-bandit-esque spinning frenzy. It makes it look like it just scrolled through fifty networks or something. Totally wrong, totally out of place, totally weird.
• 870) I love how setting the view zoon in Excel only changes it for the current sheet, not all of them, and there isn't an "apply to all sheets" option there.
• 869) Outlook Express's message composition window has the most utterly crack-fueled implementation of undo/redo that I think I've ever seen. The region of text it thinks un/redo should affect is seemingly utterly arbitrary, and pretty much always completely outright useless. Nice!
• 868) It drives me nuts that Windows XP says how many mail messages I have at the login screen, before I'm even logged in. First off, what if I don't want anybody else who uses the machine to know about my email? Second, the only reason it reports that there is 1 message is because Outlook Express is a pile of utter feces that is stuck on this one piece of email that was deleted off of the server, but cannot be deleted out of my inbox. What the fudge?!
• 867) I love how you never know if you should left- or right-click on stuff in the Task Bar's Tray.
• 866) I can't decide if this is really funny or really expletive pathetic: On this nigh brand-new, (currently) almost top of the line Dell D810 laptop running the latest Windows XP Pro, the Notepad and Wordpad applications are broken. These are the most basic, rudimentary apps that you turn to when all else fails, so it is disheartening to see that they are, themselves, utter piles of feces. To wit: Notepad has horrible redraw problems where text will become invisible, but if you select that apparent whitepsace you will see the text, and Wordpad does silly weird things like force the current line to the top of the window whenever I use the Save command.
• 865) More UI suckfulness: I did a "spelling and grammar" check in Word. It noted some things that I skipped. I wanted to go back and see those things again, but when I try to run the check again it obstinately won't run and just says "The spelling and grammar check is complete." With only an OK button. There's no obvious way to get it to re-check. Nice.
• 864) I'm very impressed with how Microsoft managed to make a total cluster <expletive> out of their ZIP implementation in Windows XP. It is stunningly slow: we're talking 5 minutes for something that takes less than 30 seconds in WinZip; and copying breaks if you close the File Explorer window that is showing the source ZIP file contents - with no warnings or error message.
• 863) I love how I tell the MS spyware thingy to allow a given program for ever, yet it asks me every time I reboot. That's usability!
• 862) When I move a desktop icon into the recycle bin, I get a dialog box talking about how it is just deleting the shortcut, not the actual application. That strikes me as a strong indictment of the whole user interface and usability of the system. Blah.
• 861) Windows XP is such a tub of poo, and people who write programs for it suck. The latest evidence is that several programs have said they want to turn off AutoRun, and I've said yes, but then the next program I install that wants it turned off doesn't realize that it is already turned off - either that, or the OS has turned it back on sneakily. It all just sums up to a confusing and rather annoying user experience.
• 860) I don't know what back-asswards school of usability the Microsoft people went to, but here's a clue: not all keyboards have a Print Screen key on them.
• 859) Real nice how the Help and Support center locks up and I have to kill the process.
• 858) You can set your system fonts to be larger via the Advanced settings in the Display control panel. The kicker is that like no 3rd party programs are smart enough to know that is possible, so none of them resize smartly, so you end up with text that is utterly screwy. Actually, the real kicker is that Microsoft sites, like Windows Update, don't even get it right!
• 857) It is impressive how this new Dell laptop with dual-monitor support completely forgets my destop settings when powered off, etc., and when i undock then redock... This is the new millenium?
• 856) Remind me never to deploy anything using dot net, since Microsoft can't keep it successfully patched. (It is happening to me on a home machine. It appears the fix was to download both .Net 1.1 SP1 and the hotfix, because the hotfix didn't think SP1 was installed, so I had to re-install it over the already installed SP1. Yikes.)
• 855) I love how right-clicking on an externally mounted hard drive doesn't give me an eject command. No, I have to go to the Tray to find the tool for unmounting hardware. And then it does the standard stupid hateful Windows thing where if anything, like the File Explorer, is showing anything about that item, it will say it can't eject it - but it won't give you a good explanation of why! It just says "try again later" which only serves to mislead and confused. Gah!
• 854) Remind me never to use Expedia.
• 853) Whatever MS does, in my mind they can never live down the whole 8.3 vs. 'Program Files' issue. Give! Me! Strength!
• 852) It drives me nuts that the "Add or Remove Programs" control panel can't tell me what files have been installed for a given program. What planet and century are we talking about, here? Oh, and,
holy discombobulated insane architecture crap!.
• 851) I love how Outlook Express lets me try to add a rule in a system where I'm really only getting IMAP email, which is precisely where rules won't work. First, they should have a better way of helping stop the user from wasting time trying to set it up since it will never work. Second, why can't it work? I can manually move things so I don't see why OE can't bloody well do the same thing. Oh, wait, maybe that's what you get when you pay the billion dollar upgrade to get the real Outlook?
• 850) On two different machines running Windows XP Pro, there is no way to get the MS Trackball Explorer's wheel button to do nothing. One machine has a check box that theoretically should let me do that, but it has no effect - pressing the wheel in still goes into that hated weird scrolling mode. On the other machine, a laptop, there is no option at all for dealing with that functionality! Nice! Hate!
• 849) IE on my brand new two thousand dollar Dell laptop machine draws grahics at the wrong resolution or size or something. Sweet! We're living in the future, baby!
• 848) When using the keyboard to go through the Programs under the Start Menu, if the list is long and you end up with multiple columns, you cannot move horizontally - no, you have to move vertically through all of the items in the first row just to get to the second. That just seems dumb.
• 847) I saw an Outlook 12 Beta demo. I actually think the new UI is freaking cool - all those pathetic OSS UI developers should get some screenshots and use them as suppositories. Oh, and it is amusing to me that the Mac doesn't support the idea of the toolstrip, and is stuck with the bog-standard old menu bar. Ha ha.
• 846) I hate systems that force a particular sorting order. Like seemingly many things from MS - Outlook Express, for example, forces the folders to be listed in alphabetical order. Stupid!
• 845) I was downloading a large file on a laptop that runs Windows XP Pro. The laptop is plugged in to the wall, it is not running on battery power. Nevertheless, the laptop turned itself off at like 90% of the way through the long download, presumably because I was just letting it sit and not actually using it manually. So my download has failed and I have to start over. I start the blame with MS, but include Mozilla since Firefox was doing the download, and doesn't have wget-like functionality. Oh, the hate.
• 844) Also? OE says "message is no longer available on the server" yet when I look at the IMAP server via any other program the message is there and perfectly readable. Too bad Thunderbird's UI killed me so much that I have to stick with OE.
• 843) I got digitally signed email in MS Outlook Express. When I respond, it wants me to sign my email. I don't have a digital signiture. OE offered to get me one, so I said yes, and that redirected me to a URL at MSN.com... which doesn't actually exist. Yes!
• 842) While MS Word will let you save a text file with different kinds of line-endings, it conspicuously doens't tell you which OS the choices are for. So if you want to save for, say, Un*x, they aren't going to actually tell you which format to use, thus perpetuating the suckage. Jerks.
• 841) Outlook Express uses a bunch of sorta vaguely different icons for its windows in the Alt-Tab list. I think they are a pretty perfect example of when text would work better.
• 840) It is the year 2005 and I still have to fight the bloody Multiple Document Interface crap! Hate!
• 839) It drives me nuts that Excel scrolls horizontally in cell steps, rather than pixel steps. So if you have a wide cell you get horribly juddery weird scrolling.
• 838) Rant on, brother. Stupid bloody MS Word.
• 837) Do not be fooled. If you move your 'My Documents' folder anywhere else, things will suck. Windows still keeps the original version of that folder on the drive/partition Windows was installed onto (which is most commonly C:). So you'll have strangeness where you tell something to download to 'My Documents' and then the file isn't visible - because it is actually in the other 'My Documents' folder. Bloody hell in a hand basket, Gates!
• 836) Additionally, when I convert to plain text in OE, it doesn't automatically wrap the lines to 80 columns (let alone 75, which would be even better). Oh the hate.
• 835) Okay! Outlook Express is admittedly not the flagship product, so maybe I am not allowed to complain. But, nevertheless, I will! When I get email from somebody in e.g.: RTF or HTML format, and then I reply to them, OE will use rich formatting to show the excerpted parts of their message. Now, see, I personally do not wish to ever send out HTML or RTF messages. So I change the formatting of the message to plain text. Unfortunately, instead of reformatting the excerpted text to have the standard '>' line header, OE just turns it into regular text. It adds a single line saying "Original Message" which means they are trying to force you to be a top poster.
• 834) Could the MS anti-spy stuff be any more of a flying turd? Certainly, as far as the UI goes it clearly sucks buttocks: it can't draw itself properly, the help text is empty, and it is completely wrong the way it puts up alert on top of alert so if you were reading one and about to try to do something about it, it interrupts you and makes everything even more stressful and confusing. Religious figure in a hand basket!
• 833) This is killing me. Even though I've set the mouse wheel button to do nothing, it still goes into free-scrolling mode when I click. I. Hate. Windows.
• 832) At the end of doing Windows Update, it shows a status report. In it is a red icon that is alarming. It is the "Errors" category. Fortunately, there is a zero next to it, saying there were no errors. Now, here's the UI clue: if there were no errors, then don't put in the alarming red category at all.
• 831) If you think this kind of thing is bad, just wait until "Trusted Computing" gets shoved into your orifices. Please, go buy a Mac already. Or, better yet, run Linux. (I don't mean that everything will be candy with those two, certainly not Linux, and I am sure that Apple has nothing nice planned for our basic consumer (let alone, in the long run, civil) rights, but it is a trade-off to get away from MS suckage.)
• 830) Don't you love how Word chokes on large files? Also, don't you love how it has "All Files (*.*)" at the top in the Open dialog box, unlike everything else (e.g.: Notepad, Wordpad) which has it at the bottom?
• 829) They are pushing .net yet their own bloody main web page for .net has (at least on 2005/7/22) no link to actually download and install it. So then I use their search and find a list of files but no single link that says "just get and install the latest verison for me so I don't have to actually think about any of this. I mean, I already feel really really dirty for deciding to download and install this Microsoft crap in the first place!" Could they be any more completely stupid?
• 828) Win XP has the ability to read the contents of Zip files (you don't have to download WinZip - I wonder if that is killing their business?). But it totally freaks out when I'm trying to copy things out of those Zip files. For example, it started off saying that the copy would take 3 hours (even though downloading the file took less than a minute!), then about 45 seconds later it said 60 seconds were remaining (with no other time estimate between those two), and then after that it went to saying 2 minutes were remaining! And it has been saying that for more than 2 minutes!
• 827) Also? The "Copying..." dialog can't handle long paths and ends up drawing crap.
• 826) I'd always been impressed with how Windows did such a good job with printing... and then I get hit with it not knowing that this printer has a duplexer, and then I have to figure out where that particular option is buried. I did eventually find it, but not through any great leads provided by Windows itself.
• 825) Oh, sure, the IntelliPoint control panel has an option for hiding the mouse pointer when you are typing. Does it work? No, no it does not.
• 824) SecureCRT has had this for years, so I don't understand why IE doesn't: If there is a URL that isn't hyperlinked, I want to be able to right-click on it and have a menu option that will take me to that URL.
• 823) When Windows XP says that it is having trouble with the USB device you just plugged in, here's some suggestions about what try (since I was just in that boat). First, have the device connected via a powered USB hub. Second, pick a more "core" USB port on your computer - the front one didn't work for me, whereas the rear ports where I already had the keyboard plugged in did. Computers suck!
• 822) Security isn't just the responsibility of one program. I mean, how many times have you thought one application or text area had focus, and typed your password, only to then look up at the screen and see it was actually going into some clear-text area for any and all to see? I think this is an issue with Windows rather than the programs - when I close a the top window, the next application window has a colored title bar, making it appear to have keyboard focus - but often it doesn't, and I have to explicitly click on it to give it focus. So that's pretty broken.
• 821) The "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer" has little icons for rotating the image 90 degrees. Whoever designed those icons sucks because what they cause to happen is the opposite of what I expect having looked at them. If you look at them very closely it stars to make sense, but nobody should have to read an icon. If there is any alternate design that would work for people just glancing at it, that should be used. In this case the solution would be to reverse the sense of the icons and also remove the microscopic arrows in them.
• 820) C# kinda screws the pooch when it comes to rethrowing exceptions.
• 819) At least they have a sense of humor: While Windows 2000 is starting up it actually says, for all to read, "Applying security policy" hardy har har!
• 818) Everybody needs killed. I sent myself some code in email using Outlook Express. I sent it as an attached .java file. Now, when I go back to look at the email, it turns out that "OE removed access to the following unsafe attachments in your mail" so I no longer have the information. Of course, it did not warn me when I was sending the email that the attachment could have been blocked. Nor is it smart enough to realize that I'm sending the email to myself and take that into consideration. The super kicker is that it is also blocking the attachment when I try to look at it from my Sent Items.
• 817) Outlook Express has lost contact with the IMAP server. It keeps popping up a dialog box telling me so, and asking me if I want to "Wait" or "Stop". Telling it to Stop apparently is the same as Wait since it comes back pretty soon thereafter with the exact same dialog box. So I quit Outlook Express. Does that stop the dialog from popping up? No. I've hidden it so all I see now is the damned thing blinking in the Task Bar all the time. Grn!
• 816) I love how MS sorts things in pretty much always the wrong way. The taskbar doesn't let you have things be organized in anything other than the order-you-opened-the-files. The VS .Net debugger chooser dialog box doesn't let things be organized in anything other than alphabetical order. Etc. It seems like another instance of some philosophy that is all about hating the user and trying to make their life hell. Like how the Open File dialog box seems to always start you off in completely the wrong place, guaranteed, every time, no matter what app you are using it from.
• 815) Allrighty, then. I think that I've come to the conclusion that the OS X Finder file browser just plain sucks. Compared to the Win XP File Explorer, which also sucks in some ways, the OS X thing is just a usability nightmare.
• 814) The Windows control panel for the mouse is better than the Mac OS X one. I feel like the Mac one never gets the mouse pointer movement right for me. Windows has a better implementation where the parameters end up working out better and I don't find myself being as frustrated with it as with the Mac (or, god, X Windows).
• 813) Computers suck. It is nice to be using on Open File dialog box, and have it completely wedge with no real explanation of why it has locked up. Maybe there is something in the FS that is locked that is causing it to freeze? Who knows?! All I know is it is lame and super suckful. "Whatever, ship it" is, I guess, the rule of the day.
• 812) I hate that the only way to burn things is to have them copied first. When filling a DVD, that takes a long time. I don't even know where they are being copied, it certainly isn't the DVD itself since that doesn't happen until the burn actually takes place. I would like to have some option for not doing the copy, rather having the files get locked. Or having some more intelligent aliasing happen or whatever. Waiting for the copy just sucks. (OS X pretty much has the same problem.)
• 811) I love how string completion is implemented differently throughout MS apps. Even within IE the behaviour is different depending on what text field you are working with: the URL address field lets you use Tab to get the selected completion, but the name field in the "enter your name and password" dialog box uses the strange "arrow down to select" interaction model. Definitely needs a good pistol whipping, there.
• 810) The way the Minimize, Maximize and Close buttons are grouped together in window titlebars is bad enough. But then Windows Media Player 10 has to go and put yet another control there, to make things even more confusing and error-prone. Sweet!
• 809) IE's AutoComplete feature puts up a dialog box asking you if you want to use it. The dialog box has a little animation of a mouse cursor moving around doing something. It really confused me because my mouse cursor was in that area alrady, so then I was like freaked out because I had no idea what was happening to my cursor. I've seen things like this before (where the demo or help is too similar to the real world and new people can't tell the difference and get really confused) and I think anybody who does stuff like that is making a mistake.
• 808) While I'm impressed that anything prints at all, ever (I mean, if you think about getting all the different program output formats, printer drivers, printer formats, etc. all communicating it is pretty crazy stuff) it still drives me up the wall how bad the printing process is. Take, for example, trying to get something to fit to a single page. There are at least two different places on my current machine inside the Print dialog box that deals with that resizing, and heaven only knows how they interact. I sure don't. All I know is more often than not, things don't turn out the way I want and I have to recycle lots of wasted paper, which is lame and sad. (As Waerhauser isn't paying MS to have obfuscated Print dialog boxes to sell more paper.)
• 807) I have three (3) different CD/DVD type drives. One DVD-ROM, one CD-R/W, one DVD-R/W. The first two are internal, connected via IDE. The last one is external, connected via USB2.0 (high speed, not full speed - whatever!). Anyway, Windows shows seemingly arbitrary and random names for them depending on heaven-only-knows what. Sometimes it labels them: "CD Drive (F:)", "CD-RW Drive (G:)" and "DVD-RW Drive (J:)". Other times, like when the external drive isn't enabled, it labels them: "CD Drive (F:)" and "CD Drive (G:)". By a process of elimination, I've determined that drive F: is actually the DVD-ROM drive; why it can't just say that it is a DVD-ROM drive rather than "CD Drive" I don't freaking understand. Lord, give me strength! (To compound the hate, I can't change the name of things in the File Explorer, or at least append something to the automatically derived name, so I have to keep re-figuring out the stupid blooding mapping. The super extra triple-plus kicker to all this is that if you right-click on the drive and bring up the Properties dialog box, it has an empty text field with a blinking cursor in it, making it look like you could actually add a note... turns out that field refuses to actually take any text.)
• 806) Here's a happy thing. My machine running XP goes catatonic whenever I try to use (get this) the File Explorer. Like, I right-click to get properties on a file (or click on a "Browse..." button to bring up a file system dialog box in an application e.g.: when installing new software, or even when that works, just using the little expand/collapse tree view to browse) and the entire explorer process locks up. Sometimes it comes back after a minute or so, most times I just kill the process. Yeah, you know, because the file system is something I can easily live without... In the end, it is probably some nefarious interaction of Zone Alarm, Windows XP, Pop-Up Stopper, and the color of my computer's case. Yes, computers are cool! (Update: unplugging my USB CompactFlash card reader seems to help reduce the freezes a lot.)
• 805) A reader reports: I've got Outlook and it automatically expands a person's name to an email address as I type. Unfortunately, it is expanding to a particular person's secondary address, that I don't want to use. So I get the details on that person and discover that the only email address it lists for them in that Properties dialog box is the correct, primary one. So I have no idea where it is getting the wrong address from, and I have no means of fixing it. Nice!
• 804) I'm completely at a loss to figure out why: IE has decided that when I click in the scroll bar to go forward one page, that instead it should really go forward two. Whatever. Update: I think I've figured out that if I click close to the thumb area, it goes one page. If I click farther away, it scrolls more. I have absolutely no bloody idea when or how that got turned on, or how to turn the retarded hateful evil wrong satanist thing off.
• 803) I'm so glad that Reload in IE doesn't actually bother to force a refresh. 'Cause, you know, I obviously don't want the new version when I'm clicking on the Reload button, right?
• 802) Whoever dreamt up "My Computer" should be thrashed. There already was the idea of the "Desktop" which covers similar territory. In the end, whenever I see those two choices I have to spend two or three seconds trying to figure out which one I actually want to choose. If I don't think but just pick then I get it wrong half of the time. That just isn't the kind of thing you want in a GUI.
• 801) The Bluetooth Mouse is sorta neat because you get the bluetooth transceiver so you can go hook up other BT stuff. But, the idea of a BT mouse (or just wireless in general? this is the first wireless mouse I've tried) is actually really stupid from the standpoint of mouse ergonomics:
  1. It takes a while for the BT system to "wake up" so you move the mouse and nothing happens for five seconds. And then the mouse pointer tries to catch up with your movements, but it gets it sorta wrong, and it ends up looking just utterly spastic. After that it is fine, but when I move my mouse I want it to just work, and immediately, you know?
  2. The mouse doesn't have a charging station, it takes 2 AA batteries. That just obviously sucks for all sorts of reasons; dealing with fading batteries; the extra weight; the cost (economic and environmental) of replacing those batteries.
  3. The mouse is heavy. Which means it doesn't move very well for small movements, because your hand has to overcome the inertia of the thing. There's just a lot more standing friction.
• 800) Okay, IE has the address bar, and you can pull-down on its little arrow to see what domains you've been to before. Only it is missing (at least) this one domain that I spend several hours last night looking at (no, not porn, but Camera Quest) . So it seems like the population of that list is just plain wrong and, in this case, useless. Yeah, great, long live the hegemony.
• 799) I have an LCD monitor. I have 2 machines, I have a KVM switch. If machine B restarts when the KVM is set to machine A, then the desktop resolution goes beyond what the LCD monitor can show, and I have to reboot. Yet I've explicitly set the resolution I want the desktop to be in the control panel. Why does it apparently try to change the resolution to something higher, when it thinks there's no monitor attached? God, I hate Windows.
• 798) Woe be anybody who makes software and gives it a name that is alphabetically after the word "windows" because then I'll never see it in the Add / Remove Programs list; I'd have to scroll for days and days to get past the ten billion Windows Updates that are listed there. Bloody genius, that is.
• 797) I'm downloading a file via IE. During that, I go into the IE Settings and Delete Temporary Internet Files. That puts up a wait cursor for ever. And ever. Are they related? Well, the download ends, but the Delete Files never seems to come back. Ever. Whatever!
• 796) Outlook pisses me off because it has folders and then shortcuts to them, and quickly things get way out of whack and I no longer know what is what. And then some things (e.g.: Archives) aren't searchable in conjunction with other 'data sources'. Yadda yadda yadda. Oh and, Outlook 2003 completely screws the pooch on UI. They've needlessly changed lots of it and made it either hard or impossible to customize it back to how my previous Outlook was. Nice.
• 795) I love how IE now won't show me anything when I "View Source" now. I didn't find any options to control dis/allowing that. When I search for "view source" in the IE online help it says "No topics found." Guess I should just switch to Linux outright comma you bastards.
• 794) The C: drive on my Win2K box is filling up. How the hell do I find out where all the space is going? There doesn't appear to be anything like the unix 'du' in the File Explorer or anything. Do I have to know DOS? What is an ordinary computer illiterate supposed to do in this case? Are we living in the future yet?
• 793) I was musing how XP isn't that bad and that maybe MS products are actually okay, and I could lean to live with them... and then IE tells me the 640MB ISO I was downloading for seven hours is done, but won't fit on the disk and basically the download was gone, lost, kaput. It sucks buttocks in so many obvious ways: It didn't tell me ahead of time, even though it knew how big the download was, that I wouldn't have room. Nor did it tell me where the cached version that IE was keeping was. I really do not understand why it does that - why not just download to the actual file you told it to directly in the first place?
• 792) I'm not kidding about this: I download the official DirectX 9 installer, and get it going. It downloads more stuff, which takes a long time, and then - and here's the kicker - a dialog box comes up saying "The software you are installing has not passed Windows Logo testing to certify its compatibility with Windows XP. This software will not be installed. Contact your system administrator." Microsoft software is refusing to install other Microsoft software. Sweet! Oh, and then it says that it can't find a file to copy, and then it utterly exits, failing to install DX. Even if I download the full redistributable package (rather than the smaller network installer stub) it fails in exactly the same way. Impressive!
• IE is full of unpatched holes. Apparently somebody doesn't want you to know about them any more, however. What is up with that?
• 791) This is just a cygwin thing? When I'm using the shell, and I use Meta-f and Meta-b, the cursor disappears. I have to wait a second for it to reappear. Happens even if I'm just using the arrow keys to move through the text on the line. Makes it pretty hard to get any line editing done. Blah!
• 790) I know I've probably already said this a zillion times, but: I cannot begin to express my hatred of the MS Windows dialog design philosophy that has the buttons labeled only "Yes" and "No", rather than something meaningful and context-sensitive like "Open Anyway" and "Don't Open", or whatever, you know? It is one of those things that might seem little to the lowest common denominator human, but which is in actual fact a gateway into the soul of the system: it is a vision of the inner, central, intrinsic, core evil that is the root of Windows and Windows applications. The really funny part is that I'm sure people working on Open Source X windows apps are going to copy it. God, I hate that.
• 789) Why is it that when I click to order things alphabetically in the Task Manager's Process tab, it sorts Z-A the first time? Everything else (e.g.: File Explorer) starts with the more sensible A-Z. Whatever!
• 788) Word and WordPad (and probably Outlook, etc.) completely screw the pooch when it comes to scrolling around images in a document when using the mouse wheel. Say you are scrolling the page to read subsequent text (so the image in the window is physically moving up to reveal more text below). When the image gets to the top and you roll the mouse wheel again, the whole page scrolls past the image. It doesn't scroll one text line height to show the next line coming in from the bottom. Which is the half of the page where your eye is. Which is what it should do. No, instead, it scrolls the height of the image. I. Utterly. Hate. That.
• 787) You gotta admit, it is pretty cool when the Windows Update system doesn't work. The CAB they tell me to use is reportedly corrupt and invalid - both WinZip and the MS extractor programs say so. Yeah, that's the way to impress me!
• 786) I dislike the toggle nature of the entries in the Task Bar - they either make the window come to the front of the window stack, or minimize down to the task bar. The problem is that if you don't know what state the window is already in (because you have a zillion IE windows open and you can't readily know which one is on top, in terms of which icon in the Task Bar it is), then clicking on the Task Bar entry will only lead you into ever deeper confusion. Yes, the entries in the Task Bar are hilighted differently to try and show which one is on top, but even with all that I still get confused pretty easily. What I would like is for silly people like me to have the option of making Task Bar buttons only bring things to the front, and nothing else. So I could click four times on a button there, and in the end no matter what I'd have that window on top.
• 785) Mac IE has the Download Manager. But the thing is utterly stupid useless brain dead wrong because it doesn't let you re-download something that was interrupted (my Mac crashed in the middle and I had to reset). Things which were downloaded 100% have a "Reload" option, but the one that got axed part way through doesn't. Which is bloody stupid because guess which one I'm most likely to want to try to download now? Jerks.
• 784) One thing that pretty much makes my head explode every damned day: When I'm trying to edit text in the address bar in IE (PC), Ctrl-A doesn't select all the text. Instead, it selects nothing and just rings the bell at me. I cannot describe the things I'd do to the person who thought of that, and who implemented it. Augh!
• 783) It pisses me off that IE doesn't let you scroll the page down to see whitespace past the end of the page. So if you are paging down, the last page doesn't move a whole page. I hate that. It also then makes the mouse wheel really annoying because you barely touch it and the page scrolls back. Argh!
• 782) It really really really pisses me off that Word moves the Find dialog rather than scrolling the text underneath to show the next match. What utterly stupid dumb cluck signed off on that UI behaviour?!
• 781) Is it me, or does the calculator accessory that comes with WinXP, even, not have a square root function? It has a log function but the help has literally no occurrence of 'log' in its index, so I'm not sure how to even use it. Whatever!
• 780) Riddle me this: Why is it apparenlty impossible for me to save the final rendered version of an HTML file via either IE or VS7? The file is basically just text - no fancy grahpics or anything in the originating HTML file, and it has line breaks in it and everything, and I just want to export it the way it looks (minus font formatting, sure) so I can use it e.g.: in Notepad. But, no, when they save things as text they end up saving the source.
• 779) Word's Find/Replace dialog is still killing me: It won't let me click on the "Ignore Once" button quickly. I mean, I can click on it, but nothing happens. I have to wait a second between clicks for each to actually register. This. Is. Insane!
• 778) I'm in the "Normal View" in Word and yet when I drag the scroll bar the window doesn't dynamically update. If, however, I'm in "Print Layout View" mode then it does. Whatever!
• 777) Word is now doing its best to capriciously utterly undo any formatting I have already applied in my document. Nice.
• 776) I must say, I really don't understand how Word has taken over. Pretty much every time I try to do some numbered paragraph, the formatting goes completely to hell. Things like:
  1. A pasted numbered paragraph automatically continues the numbering of the previous one. But I want it to restard. When I tell it to restart, however, the formatting goes utterly insane, shifting everything over to the right a million miles.
  2. I had 2 such paragraphs, each restarting the numbering. I pasted a third one and then told it to restart numbering. That not only caused the 3rd paragraph's formatting to go to hell, it also magically forced the 2nd paragraph numbering, which started from scratch, to suddenly change and be a continuation of the 1st paragraph's numbers. Uh, yeah. Nice!
• 775) Outlook sometimes shows the sender as their full name ("Joe Smith") and sometimes as their email id ("jsmit"). Most of the time, it shows the full name. So when I'm trying to go back and find old email, I'm looking for the full name... and then finally discover it is like the one item that is shown with the email id instead. While I'm willing to believe it has something to do with the source of the email, and the vagaries of email headers, it still sucks a lot of ass.
• 774) YARtHMP (Yet Another Reason to Hate Microsoft Products): In Word and in Outlook, if I select part of a line of text including the very end of it, and then use the backspace key on my keyboard, the text of the following line is suddenly brought up - apparently the line break (is that CR or NL or both in Windows, another lovely MSism) is deleted with the text I hilighted. I'm pretty sure that on old Mac text editors that would not be the behaviour. Hell, if you use MS Notepad, it doesn't work that way! So I think WordPad, Word, Outlook, etc. are just plain stupid wrong broken asinine misguided dumb hateful crap.
• 773) For crying out loud. I have a numbered list in Word. I start out with it being all italicized, and then I want to make it not. I hilight the whole thing and un-italicize it, which works on all the text with the exception of the final marker for the final list entry. No matter what I do, I cannot get that leading text to be non-italicized, even though the body text for that item is not. In the end, I have to entirely delete that line and reenter it. Nice!
• 772) My monitor is set to 1280x1024, and yet the Document Map in Word uses completely illegibly tiny small fonts, completely undermining any useful information I might have been able to glean from it. Impressive! (Help says "In the Format Settings dialog box, select the Document Map check box, and then click OK." But there is no such check box in that dialog.)
• 771) I'm listening to a CD in Windows Media Player. In a separate IE window, I'm trying to get to a movie on the web. It stops my CD and starts loading the movie in WMP. It doesn't ask me if I want to do that. Then, while it is loading the movie, I'm like "okay, I wanted to listen to a different CD anyway" so I eject the CD and put a new one in. When the tray closes... the movie I was downloading and watching goes away and WMP starts playing the CD I just put in. God. Give. Me. Strength.
• 770) I use the "go to" feature of Word to go to page 100. I read some stuff there. Then, I want to go to, say, page 20. So I do Ctrl-G and type 20. What happens? It tries to take me to page 20100. Yeah, that's cool. (What they forgot to do was make the old value entirely selected when I bring up the dialog box the 2nd time, so that if I just type something it will be overwritten. VStudio gets it right.)
• 769) I print something out in Word. Then, I want to print out another thing from Word. The second time I do Ctrl-P, it brings up a dialog I've never seen before in my life, saying something about how Word is already printing something. It is scary, and makes me wonder, "If I try to continue doing the new print job, what happens to the old one? Does it get terminated?" The dialog box in no way attempts to explain or reassure. Hate.
• 768) In whatever version of Word I'm using, the Status Bar is not something you can turn on from the regular main View menu. Whatever. And, when you go read the help that tells you how to turn it on, it says, "click Options on the Tools menu, click the View tab, and then select the Status bar check box under Show." Note how it doesn't tell you things in the order you'd need to look for them in. It should read "On the Tools menu, click Options...". Yeah, great, terrific. Ship it! Oh, and the kicker is that the status bar doesn't tell you what page you are looking at, it only tells you the page number where the cursor is. So as you are scrolling through the document you have to click every time you wanna know what page you are actually seeing.
• 767) I'm trying to import data into Excel. I'm constantly tweaking the program which generates it, so I'm constantly re-importing the data. So it is really great that Excel's dialog to find the file to import forgets where I just loaded the file from, every time. It puts me in some god-forsaken other place, and I have to re-navigate all the way back to my file. Every time. Every. Time.
• 766) I love how if you right-click on IE on the desktop, you get a completely different dialog than if you right-click on the entry in the Quick Launch toolbar.
• 765) You can download an installer for a program, and run it, only to have it show you the installer for a completely different program. Apparently, somehow Windows gets confused about which .msi it is supposed to be running. That sounds like a really good design, folks.
• 764) I don't know if it is an issue with Windows, or with this Microsoft mouse hardware, but the scroll wheel has a very annoying tendency: basically, it appears to have been implemented so that it takes like three little steps of the wheel mouse to actually tell the system to scroll once. This is presumably to avoid having the thing scrolling like crazy just because you accidentally touch the scroll wheel once. That is sorta okay (I'd argue that perhaps a better thing to do is make the scroll wheels slightly tighter so one rotational click is a little harder to do, and let 1 click be 1 click, but whatever), but then the problem is you go 3 steps one way, and then you'd expect the threshold to reset, right? So that if you wanted to go back, you'd have to go 3 steps the other way. Well, that doesn't seem to be how it works. However it is done internally, what I experience empirically is that now it only takes 1 step to go backward; the mouse is sitting on the fence and is easily perturbed. Which puts me into the crappy case that I'd guess they were trying to avoid in the first place! So it all adds up to tremendous suck.
• 763) I'm using Mac IE 5.2.1 (4717) under OS X and it kinda sucks in that:
  1. Every time I try to get the Software Update for it, I get a dialog message saying it utterly failed and wasn't updated. There is no further explanation (dunno if that is Apple's fault - Software Update might just plain suck and not allow for more logging or something) so there really isn't anything I can do to try and fix it myself. What. Ever.
  2. I've got a macally ikey USB keyboard hooked up to a B&W G3. It has 'home' and 'end' keys in between the alpha-numeric part and the numeric pad. You know, just above the inverted T cursor keys. Anyway, in IE (and not in e.g.: TextEdit) the keys do... nothing when you are in an HTML text entry field. So, like, editing text in Google's search terms field is sheer pain.
  3. I'm thinking their selection behaviour when I click in the Address window is completely different from the standard Mac behaviour, and I can't apparently change it, so in the end I'm always caught in some horrible cycle of clicking in various stuttering ways to try and get what I want selected, and only ever having exactly what I don't want selected being selected. A. Complete. Nightmare.
  4. There is apparently no way for me to change the font size in the Preferences dialog (by that I mean of the fonts used to actually draw the contents of the dialog), nor can I change the size of the font in the Address entry field. Great. It also doesn't let me make the font in the status bar larger, so when I'm mousing over links and trying to read what they are, my eyes get strained pretty quickly.
  5. It fairly often loses the place where I was on the page when I go Back, so then I have to re-scroll down to wherever I was.
  6. The address completion kills me; I want there to be a middle ground where it shows the options and lets me pick one, and doesn't default to the first one. So if I type a partial URL (relative to its list of possible matches), and hit Return, it doesn't magically force it to be the longer URL, it leaves it the way I typed it. If I wanted the longer one, I should have to use Tab or arrow-down into that history list and then press Return. Jerks.
  7. Its sense of how to resize a window when I click on the title bar 'maximize' button leaves something to be desired.
  8. Fairly often, it utterly fails to draw the page. If I move my mouse around, things will draw under the mouse. Of, if I scroll down then back up, things that come in from off-screen get drawn then. Yay.
• 762) Outlook is so nice and helpful. It has decided that there are a few "James"es that I write email to. So when I'm typing "James" into the To: field, it shows me the list of James it thinks I care about. Well, the top one is a James that I completely do not recognize, and would pretty much never want to send mail to. But already I've accidentally sent him mail twice because Outlook has put his name in the list. How the hell do I remove it? Why is it in there at all? And, why is it at the top of the list? Augh!
• 761) I upgrade to Windows Media 9. Now, when I try to play or record CDs, the songs skip. This happens with every CD I've played so far. Nice! Now, sure, it might be the CD player in the computer, or something, but if I were just Joe Mr. Off the Street, I'd be like "great, gotta love this upgrade!" But, wait, there's more! When I rip them and play the rips, they skip too! But wait, wait! Playing rips from before the upgrade, i.e.: WM8, also skip! So by upgrading to WM9, all my music is completely hosed! YES! They've reduced my, what, like originally two thousand dollar machine down to something that can't match my fifty dollar CD player. (Oh, and if you search for "bug report" in the WMP help you get nothing. Ha ha ha ha ha. It must be so nice to be the hegemony.)
• 760) My Win2K box has some network mounted drives. I'm guessing they are what's hosing me - if I try to Open a file in something like VS, then the Open File dialog hangs for a long time, not drawing anything, not responding in any way... yeah, that's customer service! I mean, whatever is causing the problem, you should endeavour to make your system deal with it and avoid having the whole UI lock up for sixty seconds, ya know?
• 759) I love how even the most recent versions of IE can get into a state where the globe is spinning, and clicking on the Stop button does nothing, and the globe just keeps on spinning...
• 758) This exemplifies the level of quality I have come to expect from MS products: "Your password expires in 1 days [sic]."
• 757) I've got WinXP Pro installed on a machine, and when I try to search for files, nothing happens. The File Explorer says that it is searching, but it says that for ever. This apparently only happens when I search My Documents. Argh.
• 756) They have erred on the side of security, for once? Although right now it is pissing me off, of course. To wit, I open a .htm (start the revolution, not .html) file on my local hard drive, and it falls under the Internet Security Zone. Not Intranet. Hate. So I have to futz around with lowering the security for the entire Internet to run this local test thing. Yay!
• 755) This is pretty impressive: If I run Outlook twice, I get 2 Outlooks. However, if I then go to the File menu in one of them, and choose Exit... they both go away. Yes!
• 754) I'm so glad that Windows XP brings back my favorite feature of Windows 95: having the Start Menu disappear out from under you if you use it right away after logging in. Like, you log in, you click on the Start Menu, it appears, you move to find what you want, and as you are doing so it suddenly disappears! Yes! That's user interaction satisfaction, baby! Shoot to kill.
• 753) When you have a tall list (e.g.: you've maximized the File Explorer) of stuff, with multiple columns, it can be hard to know how that stuff is sorted. So then you think something is missing but really the sort order isn't what you want, and that is why the file isn't showing up where you expect it. I wish the column that is in control of the sort had its background color slightly altered to hilight the fact.
• 752) All this talk to getting rid of legacy devices like floppy drives, yet my copy of Windows XP Pro is so stupid it can only read off of floppy drives to get extra RAID or SCSI drivers during the install / recover process. Nice!
• 751) I like how when I tell IE 6.0.2600.blah to clear out the History it asks me if I'm sure, and I say yes, and then... nothing gets deleted. Nice! A little searching through the file system indicates that it deleted everything except for whatever was from "Today". Right, terrific, yeah, great! Idiots.
• 750) I'm deleting lots of mail in Outlook. The server is taking for ever to actually do it. While it is churning, a reminder for a recurring meeting comes up. I click "Dismiss" on it and then appears a dialog box saying something like "Do you want to delete the item?" which sounds like it wants to delete all occurrences of that meeting, which I don't want to do! So I click No and then realize that it was a dialog box about the messages I was trying to delete. Augh!
• 749) I'm looking at mail in Outlook. It shows me the headers. However, it shows me the email names as "friendly" names rather than the raw header. That sucks because it just shows e.g.: "Fred Barf" in the CC: lines, and I know that Fred has at least two different email addresses. What I really need to know right now is which one was used. However, when I double-click on Fred it brings up the entry for him in my Address book, but there isn't anything explaining which address it was sent to. So I guess there is no simple way I can find out, short of, I dunno, saving the message out to disk or something? This is so utterly stupid and broken!
• 748) It kills me that browsers are this lame still: I copy two lines of text, and then try to paste them into the search text field in Google. I only get one of the original lines of text. Why not just bloody well take out the bloody newlines?
• 747) More you-know-what. Windows seems to have defined standard behaviour to include this: I've got the focus in the main app Window (e.g.: I'm editing text in VS). Then I do Alt-f to get to the File menu. Then, I realize I don't wanna do that, so I press the Esc key. The menu goes away... but when I type suddenly rather than editing the text back where I was, other menus start opening from the menu bar. See, you have to press Esc twice to get the focus back where you started. I think that is blatantly stupid, wrong, broken, back-asswards.
• 746) I love how even in IE6 you cannot get a view of your Favorites where you see the URL rather than the page title.
• 745) I'm glad that the Command Prompt still doesn't have any kind of logging.
• 744) Could the UI for changing desktop icons (e.g.: making the full Recycle Bin look like the empty one so it stops stressing me out) be any more pathetic? Argh!
• 743) When you set up a restore point in WinXP, there is a text entry field where you can enter a name for it. Underneath there is some help text saying that the date and time are automatically added to the restore point. Presumably, they are telling you this so you don't have to enter it into the title text field manually. It strikes me that since a cardinal rule of UI design is that nobody reads the help text, it would have been better to just show the date and time next to the text field. That was it is just plainly obvious, rather than there being this indirection through the help text, ya know?
• 742) I am going to start screaming. I'm trying to repair a WinXP installation. I get all the way through loading up to the point where I can type 'R' and get into the repair system. Then it asks me to log into a Windows installation e.g.: by pressing '1' (since there only is one installation on the hard drive), or press 'Enter' to reboot. You know, the key that most times you'd type to get the default selection. So you are, or at least I am, likely to press Enter wanting to just go into the default installation... and instead the machine reboots and you have to start all over again. Not to mention the fact that since there is only one Windows installation, the bloody machine should just boot into that directly. There's really no need to be asking me which one to use. Oh, the hate!
• 741) Perhaps this is a result of the File Explorer really being IE... say I'm looking at a directory with lots of files in it, and I only want to see the files ending in ".foo". Well, I'd like to enter the path into the Address bar like this: "fu/bar/baz/*.foo". But, of course, that doesn't work. Yay! Thanks! Yes! Wonderful!
• 740) The so-called Advanced Search in Outlook could more properly be deemed the Advanced Crappy Useless Non-Search. It doesn't let me search both archives at the same time. It doesn't let me search local archives when the networks is down. Etc.
• 739) I wish the File Explorer had a right-click menu entry for "New Shell Here" (rather than having to find some 3rd party util to get that).
• 738) Have I mentioned this? When you Search for a file in e.g.: Win2K, you can save the results. Well, there is File / Save Search. Only it turns out that it doesn't actually save the results, it saves the query. So if your search was evil and long and difficult, you potentially have to go through it all over again, which seems why I would have tried the Save Search thing in the first damned place!
• 737) Maybe there is a way to fix this, but I haven't found it yet: Outlook will put a little envelope icon in the Tray when there is new email. But I really only want it to show up when there is new email in certain mail folders, and not in others. (Or, I wanna turn it off completely.) Blah!
• 736) I have a Word document with a hyperlink in it. I right-click and choose "Copy Hyperlink". I then go to IE and try to paste it into the Address field. Nothing happens. It never copied it in a form that is useful to other programs, apparently. Yes!
• 735) Yet another pooch that got screwed somewhere in Redmond: When a program crashes in XP, a dialog box comes up saying you can send a report to Microsoft about it. It will show you various information about the crash. However, there isn't any apparent way to copy that information for sending to anybody other than MS, like, say, the people who wrote the bloody application in the first place, who might be the ones most bloody likely to be able to fix the problem. Gah!
• 734) Yeah! I love the perfect integration and interaction on MS products! Like, I installed an MS photo editing program (a brand new version) on a box running XP. There is a folder with a bunch of images I'd like to look at. So I select them all in the File Explorer and then right-click on one and do Open With the new photo program. Well, instead of opening all the files, it only opens the one that I was right-clicking on. Yes! Oh, and the photo program doesn't have a key binding for Close Window. (And even if they did, they would probably make it Ctrl-F4 rather than Ctrl-W comma the bastards.)
• 733) Don't talk to me about MFC. Neither the documentation or the actual implementation seem to be even vaguely correct when it comes to e.g.: the CStringList. Trying to use the Position APIs failed miserably (iterating would just keep returning a single item in the list), and when I looked at the documentation for it, it showed me docs on the parent object list class and then talked about the child classes that handle strings and pointers. But the string one said it returned void*'s and the pointer one said it returned CString's. Just beautiful.
• 732) My Dell laptop has a little track pad. I also tried using an external PS/2 Kensington track ball. Also, at some point I upgraded to WinXP. Somehow, those things all conspired to make my life suck: the mouse driver ended up being the standard MS mouse driver. The problem is that the trackpad has (apparently in hardware?) a "feature" where you can tap on the pad to simulate a mouse click. Personally, I absolutely loathe it. It makes life total hell. The driver which used to be operational was specific to the trackpad and let you turn that crap off, but here I was stuck with the generic MS driver now. Anyway, I was trying to figure out what to do about it, and saw that I could try to "roll back" the mouse driver. The kicker is that when you do that, it asks you "Are you sure?" but never tells you what it is going to roll back to. So basically it gives you absolutely no information about what it really is going to do, but then it asks you to be sure... Yeah, that is a quality user interaction, there! The kicker is that, of course, after all this I did get the hardware-specific driver, but the checkbox that lets me disable the tap-as-click feature is grayed out. And there is no explanation why. I think that is how it was before, and is what led me to try using the stupid Kensington external track ball in the first place... Ha ha.
• 731) It tickles me pink how every version of Windows even including XP will have some file lock for several seconds after the using application has been quit by me. E.g.: I have a WinZip file which I expand using the WinZip app, then I quit WinZip, then I go to delete the file... and I'm told that I can't because it would be a sharing violation. So I wait five seconds and try again, and repeat, until eventually I can get rid of it. Yeah. Wunderbar.
• 730) Yes! Outlook will let me insert a file as all sorts of things, but it won't let me insert it as an inline image. To do that, you have to open another application like Paint, load the file into there, copy it, and then paste it into Outlook. Yeah, terrific.
• 729) I love how, when I am downloading a file through IE, there are at least two completely different types of dialog boxes that come up. For example, if I minimize one kind, it goes into the Task Bar (like everything else). However, the other kind doesn't go into the Task Bar but instead becomes just a title bar, sitting just above it. What. Ever!!! Gah!!!
• 728) Why is it that every Windows app has the wrong idea of what a word is in the context of what the application lets you work on? So that when I do Ctrl+arrow it usually goes entirely too far? I mean, in VS7 if you Ctrl+arrow in a path (e.g.: setting the debugging paths) it doesn't take you one directory along, it moves to the very start or end of the line. Isn't that what Ctrl+End should do? The counter example is IE, where to get to the bottom of a page I have to hit Ctrl-End twice to get to the end of the document. I don't know what it is doing the first time. (Yeah, I could just hit End without the Ctrl, but it is habit from other MS apps, okay?) Remember, kids, you can't spell 'whatever' without spelling hate.
• 727) It is pretty funny how MS doesn't follow its own advice. For example, in Writing Solid Code, it is suggested that returning -1 as a special error code (when non-negative returned values are not errors but, say, indices into arrays) is horribly horribly evil and broken and stupid. And hateful. Well, guess what they've done in C#? Take a look at String.IndexOf(), ladies and gentlemen.
• 726) Could IE have more different and crappy ways of entering the names of web sites into various Options? E.g.: when setting up Zones it works one way, but when setting which sites to hit directly and skip around the proxy, you enter it a different way. Could I loathe IE more?
• 725) I still love how there is no right-click menu entry in IE to "Copy as ASCII" so when I paste into other things, they completely freak out on the MS codepage!
• 724) IE just gets to be ever more an obfuscated pile of poo. For example, how many different paths through the Options UI are there for security? There are the Zones, and then there is the separate Cookie control. So if you set up stuff in a Trusted Zone, that can be somewhat orthogonal to your Cookie settings. And, don't even get me started about Accessibility.
• 723) Is it me, or does the online MSDN documentation for nmake never specify exactly what kind of timestamp it checks for dependencies? Is it the creation time of a file? The last accessed time? What?
• 722) I'm using Microsoft Digital Image Pro 7.0. When you paint freehand, you can change the brush shape. I have it set to be a square. What is funny is that the brush cursor remains a circle. So it doesn't really tell me where the paint is going to be applied. Yeah, great. The absolute kicker, however, is that while I'm painting with a solid color, and with a solid brush (no fade out around the brush edges), the program is spitting out artifacts all over the place. It literally cannot paint correctly!
• 721) You'd think that Nmake would have a full complement of debugging messages and tools. Well, you'd be wrong.
• 720) Nmake checks the timestamps on files down to the second. However, "dir" only shows you down to the minute. So you cannot use "dir" to debug timestamp dependency bugs. Yeah! That's what I call a real development system!
• 719) Can I just say that filename completion in the DOS Shell in (at least) Win2K is utterly stupid? It does greedy completion rather than stopping at the first difference. Since I grew up using the unix approach, I find the MS implementation to be completely from hell.
• 718) Why I like the Xbox over e.g.: the PS2... I didn't have to go out and buy a stupid 8 meg ram card for 25 bucks after spending cash on the console. Sony, gurm!
• 717) I have an Xbox. When you turn it on without any DVD in it, you get the green screens that are the configuration menus. That is all well and good, but what sucks ass about them is that even when you are doing nothing, the thing is making noise; various sound effects. Look, if I'm not doing anything with the thing, I want it to be silent, okay?
• 716) Yeah, Outlook, baby! Yeah! I go to open pretty much any attached .jpg and all I get is "the path couldn't be found." No further explanation. Yeah!!
• 715) Some reasons why I hate MS Access:
  1. I'm looking through sorted data and find the place where I want to add a new record. So I right-click and add a new record there because I want to be able to see the context of the other stuff to help me enter the right new data. However, Access forces me to the last line of the entire DB, far far away from any context I need. This does not put me in a good mood. (Especially since Excel does it right.)
  2. You can't triple-click in a cell to select all the text in it. So I use the thing where you can select the whole cell (not just it's text) and copy that. Then I go to the next cell over to paste - which works - but after that happens the selection goes to the next row in the DB (which actually isn't even a valid row, it is the end of the world in the DB). Quite possibly one of the top ten most stupid places for the selection to go!
• 714) More blatant stupidity: I am telnetted to various places. I'm also running Windows Update in the background via IE. When WU gets done, it puts up a dialog telling me that I need to reboot... and it kills all my telnet connections! What a complete piece of hateful crap! Hate!
• 713) Ugh. You'd think the Out of Office Assistant UI would be like, well, good. You'd be wrong. Hate!
• 712) I'm not sure I can find enough expletives: there is no logging of Outlooks rules being applied. So it is rather difficult to debug them. (I'm not even working on a complicated one, but Outlook is such a pile of poo that it doesn't work.)
• 711) Outlook's Rules Wizard: A new height of suck!
• 710) USB simply doesn't work on any of my WinXP boxes. Well, actually, I've had things connected successfully maybe once or twice, but even then within a reboot or two everything goes to hell. What is so bloody difficult about supporting bloody USB? I thought the whole point of USB was to make connecting peripherals fool-proof? Gah, I hate everybody. See, I have a USB hub with built-in IRDA. It worked for a while on my latest WinXP PC... and then stopped being recognized as having IR after I installed the Nokia software that is supposed to let me sync with my phone. Ironic, since that is the single reason I bought the hub in the first place. Now, no matter what I do, no matter how far back I try to do a system restore, the IRDA feature is not detectable by WinXP. It sees it as some Unsupported Device, and I have yet to figure out anything I can do to fix it and make the IRDA port come back. What a living hell. Long live the technological future.
• 709) You know, I uninstalled the suck-ass MS Photo Draw program from my machine a long time ago... and IE still has a menu item in the right-click menu for images saying "Open in MS Photo Draw." Yeah, great, genius, impressive.
• 708) Could the File Explorer be any more of a piece of crap? Notice that there is no way to close the hilighted folder! Whatever.
• 707) The ruler in MS Word has some tick marks which lead me to think that the tabbing alignment pointers can be moved to point along those marks. But, in fact, the set of places where Word will let me move the pointers is different from where the tick marks are. In some places they actually do line up, and I can have a pointer at a tick mark, but in plenty of places they don't. Seems completely and utterly broken to me.
• 706) Don't even get me started on the Archive UI in Outlook.
• 705) Apparently, there isn't a way in Outlook to see the contents of a folder in the date order you put stuff in there. So when I delete something old, it goes into my Deleted folder but by the date of the original email. Which means it is really hard to find something I just deleted but didn't want to. ^Z doesn't seem to do anything, either.
• 704) I have an optical MS Trackball Explorer. It has lots of buttons. I really only use two button functions: left click and right click. I'd actually like to assign right click to more than one button... but the Intellimouse control panel tells me that is verboten. Who can I slap, please? Repeatedly!
• 703) The XBox has two buttons on the front. One is a small one for the power, the other is a large one for opening the DVD/CD tray. What I think is doofy is that the tray button is the only one which lights up; I much more closely associate lighting with the power switch.
• 702) Why is it that, in this new Millennium, IE still can do the thing where I click on a link, things are spinning but nothing retrieved, I try to click on the Stop button and it won't listen? This is so pathetic.
• 701) I love how in Outlook is says "Drafts (1)" and then when I click on that folder to see the draft message, it says "There are no items to show in this view." Whatever.
• 700) In Outlook it tells me I can export as Comma Separated Values (Windows) or (MS-DOS), and it also lists Tab Separated Values (Windows) or (MS-DOS)... but nowhere does it explain what the bloody difference is between (Windows) and (MS-DOS). Hate!
• 699) Hey, I'm impressed: I bring up the Windows XP Pro Help and enter "screen shot". Not only does the entire Help app go out to lunch for three minutes before showing me anything (even a wait cursor), but there are no results. No results for "screen capture" either. Yay. So I enter "picture" and there finally is "Take a picture of what is on your screen." Whatever.
• 698) Could adding a new Contact in Outlook be more of a convoluted piece of crap? Blah. (Note: Had I discovered the "spreadsheet" view I might not have been in such hell. Well, except for the fact that e.g.: it doesn't give you a pop-up menu for the "File As" field.) Small examples (because the really broken things take too long to explain, because the UI is so convoluted):
  1. The font is too small and there is no quick and obvious way to make it larger.
  2. When I enter text in the Address field, it thinks I'm entering the city; it puts up the full Address dialog and has completely mangled whatever I've entered with no apparent rhyme or reason. It isn't using line breaks or anything sensible to put things into the dialog box's fields.
  3. It annoys me that it puts up dialog boxes without any warning. So I'm trying to tab over somewhere to enter more data, and it puts up a dialog box (e.g.: for the Address, or for the Full Name). And then if I hit Esc or whatever, the cursor isn't in the destination field, but in the one I was trying to get out of in the first place.
  And not only is the UI for entering stuff suck-ass-tastic, but after I enter a bunch of stuff I bring up the Address Book and there are no entries shown, no matter what Address List I select. (Yet when I search for a name it finds stuff I've entered, so the data is hidden somewhere.)
• 697) The IntelliPoint software has a tool to try and set the orientation of the input device. It works by letting you drag something vertically. That's fine, and seems to do an okay job there, but then when I move left and right, those aren't true horizontal. So I think they've only got half of the issue taken care of. Kinda sucks!
• 696) Genius. I'm doing an install over the network. It takes a loooong time to get the installer. Then, once I have it, it says there isn't enough room to install, and quits. Which means I have to pull it over the network again. And this is for official, brand-spanking-new, MS created software. Yes!
• 695) Maybe I'm using the wrong version of .Net or something, but the database access stuff is killing me. It is mostly okay, everything was fine... up until the point where I wanted to get the primary key of the table. It was marked as primary in Access, but the C# app said no pk existed. Turns out if I close Access completely so nothing is touching the database, then (and apparently only then) the C# app notices the pk. So. Where do I start the hurting?
• 694) Have you ever tried to add a network printer? What a bloody nightmare. It can't even do a partial name search. And after all that, it asks me if I want to use that printer as the default one and I say 'yes' and then when I get back to the Print dialog, the new printer I just added isn't selected. Even though I just said I want it to be the default printer. And, you'd figure that if I just went to all the trouble of adding it right there and then, that maybe it is because I want to actually print something to it!
• 693) I hate MS Access: I think that a UI for Find should default to the widest possible matching criteria, rather than the most restrictive.
• 692) Have I mentioned recently how much I hate MS Access? I enter a new record. It conflicts with another one based on primary key values. I cannot search for the other one because every time I try to do something, I get the dialog box telling me of the primary key conflict. So in order to resolve it, I apparently have to delete the row I just entered, find the old conflict, and re-enter the new one with the modification. If they just let me do stuff until time came to save, my life would be infinitely easier! Blah! (Further irony: I can't even select the row to delete - it gives me the stupid error dialog again.)
• 691) I think it is just peachy that you can get a sharing violation, quit whatever has the lock, and then still get the violation for another few minutes.
• 690) Apple describes some Windows problems, including the usual look of dialog boxes. In Windows, they tend to only say stuff like "OK" or "Cancel" rather than "Don't Save" - it is item number 9 in the Apple list, "Design Clear Dialogs." Mac dialog button labels are supposed to tell you what pressing the button will do. Much more clear, I think. Anyway, I think one of the reasons crappy dialogs exist in Windows is that the standard MFC utility call ::MessageBox() doesn't let you set the text of the buttons it puts up. You are restricted to choosing from a set of pre-defined dialog boxes. The things you can change are stupid things like the icons. Big whoop-de-doo, that'll really clarify stuff for the user!
• 689) A network machine is down. I have a drive letter mapped to a folder on it. Whenever I try to use the Open File dialog, the pop-up menu that lists my machine folder hierarchy causes the app to lock up. Now that's what the Danes call quality!
• 688) Save As... in Outlook has various formats, but explicitly does not have HTML. Whatever.
• 687) I really like the size of the xbox controllers. (I'm over 30, BTW.) They might seem odd at first, but now the Dreamcast controllers feel really bad and carpel tunnel inducing.
• 686) There is no Search and Replace when composing a new message in Outlook. This. Is. Insane.
• 685) If a file is being read by a process (only read, mind you) apparently no other process can read it. That is sheer genius.
• 684) I'd really like it if MS could come up with yet another completely different implementation of the expletive menu bar for their programs. Oh, wait, they did with VS7. Kill, kill, killy kill kill. If VS doesn't have focus, and I click on the File menu there, the app gets focus and the "File" is hilighted. If I move my mouse away the hilighting goes away. However, if I don't move the mouse away but instead click again, the File stays hilighted. No menu appears, however. When I move the mouse away, the hilight stays. So I'm patiently waiting for the menu to appear and it never does. Whatever! What! Ever! Whatever! In IE, as soon as you click on the File menu, even if the app doesn't already have focus, the app gets focus and the menu appears immediately. Inconsistency is apparently the last refuge of the weak and the insecure.
• 683) I want to be able to tell all of Windows to always default to "All Files" in any Open dialog. Gah!
• 682) MS has a habit of putting too many little tweaky things in their UI buttons. The little arrow on the IE Back button might seem nifty, but then you get little tabs for moving tool bars and you get little arrows for choosing how to Open a file (as text, as binary, etc), and the chances are ever increasing that some day you will want to do one thing by clicking, and because the mouse pointer is off by a few pixels, something entirely different will happen. I. Really. Hate. That.
• 681) I get email. It has an image attachment. I'm reading it in Outlook. I double-click on the image. It asks me if I want to open it or save it. I say that I want to open it. It then gives me an error dialog which says something like "cannot find the specified path." It doesn't say what path, nor does it offer me any way to fix the thing now, or for the future. I. Hate.
• 680) Frames suck. Iframes suck. The fact that a frame can still be loading and neither the mouse cursor nor the spinning icon are showing any activity sucks. Argh!
• 679) I hate how when you empty the Recycle Bin it asks you e.g.: if you are sure that you want to delete these 9 items, but then doesn't give you any information about what the 9 items are.
• 678) Feel the love. I've got 2 cd units in a machine. One is a reader, the other is also a writer. They show up in the File Explorer as G: and H:. I'm not sure which is which. There isn't any information displayed in the Explorer to tell me. So I right-click on one of them in the hopes of seeing info like the name of the manufacturer (which I know enough from to determine which is which). So in the Properties dialog I click on Hardware... and it shows me a list of all drives, with no information about what letter they are mounted as, rather than just showing me information like the drive letter for the single item I right-clicked on to get Properties in the first place. Yay!
• 677) Is it just me, or is Outlook a piece of crap? Especially when it comes to how you set up rules for filtering email? I get email with a subject line like "Version7.3 Serial Number 74B Report" and I want to filter those out. Well, at the very least I want it to ignore the serial number because that changes every time. But the "wizard" I get when I right-click on the message to set up refiling rules is designed to make it as annoying as possible for me to be able to do that, apparently. It wants to treat things I enter as full strings rather than as a set of words to require. In other words instead of doing "foo bar" it should be doing "foo (logical-and) bar." Boy, I hate.
• 676) It pisses me off that only some things support Ctrl-BackSpace to delete the entire previous word.
• 675) Once again, my mind is blown. Apparently, when you use FindFirstFile() and you get a valid file handle back, that file handle doesn't work as-is with e.g.: ReadFile(). I had to construct another new file handle that included the path all over again. What is the bloody point of getting back a file handle that doesn't work from FindFirstFile()?
• 674) Is it me, or can you not use a doskey that you defined previously in the same batch file inside another doskey definition? I'm so glad to be stuck using this crap.
• 673) Why does the so-called Advanced Find in Outlook not support regexps? I mean, what is so advanced about that?
• 672) For the most part, I want to really hurt people who implement click-to-select-text as one-click- selects-the-whole-text rather than having it just set the insertion point, and having double clicking do either a word or the whole field. (Preferably triple clicking doing the whole field, personally).
• 671) The volume controls (at least in Win2K) are already a complete piece of confusing over complicated crap, yet the system doesn't support something that I want. See, I'm playing some ripped audio files (yes, from CDs that I myself own, okay?) and I'd like to not hear the system dings over the music. But both are being generated by the sound card. There is no way to tell the system to turn down the volume of beeps separate from the music. Blah! Blah, I say!
• 670) xcopy has a way to tell it to assume that what you are copying is a directory. I don't see a way to tell it to assume it is a file. So you get the prompt. Which makes automated building not work so well. Which makes me hate.
• 669) This is great. Every time I try to do a Search in the File Explorer now, the new Search window is created beneath the Explorer window. So all I visibly get is an entry in the Task Bar that is flashing. I have no earthly idea how/why this happens, but it sure is annoying! "New, Windows 2000, now 16.3% more annoying!"
• 668) The "working" animation in IE is bad because it relies on the user looking at it for a minimum length of time to see the animation. If you just glance at it you don't see anything moving. Worse, the animation includes the non-animated image. That means if you glance at the animation while it is showing the frames which match the non-animated mode, it looks like it is not doing anything.
• 667) I'm trying to set permissions on a file on NTFS. I click that I want to deny "Modify" and suddenly the check box for "Deny Read" gets checked as well! What the hell has reading something got to do with modifying it? I could understand it modifying some metadata about the file, but it sure as hell shouldn't be modifying the file contents themselves. My lord in heaven, I don't need this kind of crap when I'm stuck at work at quarter to eleven on a bloody Saturday night. Hell!
• 666) What would be so expletive har