Oh. My. God.
 

I have just bought a new desktop from PC World (I was in desperate need) and it has Windows Vista. I have only had it for 5 minutes but I hate it with all of my soul.

They have used essentially the same format since Windows 95 changed the world. It was simple and effective, why have they ****ed it up? Everything is different and I do not like change.

When I had XP I essentially changed it back to 95/98 but so far I'm struggling to do this.

So tell me, des it get any easier?

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

I don't know if using Vista gets any easier because I can't see how it could be...what exactly are you having problems with?

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I'm using Vista and find it much quicker and easier to use than XP.

What is it you exactly find difficult with? I find its indexing and file management far superior to XP. You can tone down the graphical stuff. People whining that Vista is a big buggy mess, to be honest I think it just saying it for the sake that it's an easy target on Microsoft who they hate yet also depend on slightly.

You probably just hate it because it's new and you don't know your way round it yet. Once you get used to it I think you'll enjoy the experience a lot more.

If you have any problems or want some help give me a poke on IRC or say here & I'll try to help :-)

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

On another note; Why on earth did you buy a computer from PC World?

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It takes getting used to at first.. but once you learn the new layout its a ****load better than XP.

Only first time advice I can give is Control Panel->User Accounts->Turn User Account Control off

doing so will save your sanity from the unrelenting UAC dialogue.

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The new interface isn't that different from XP imho. The changes in conventions (e.g. making "Documents and Settings" into "Users" and simplifying the folders which sit under it) have all largely been improvements. It takes some time to get used to little things like trying to find what "Add/Remove Programs" and the like are now called, but

Things like task manager and msconfig have more features than they did previously, but on the whole I was surprised by how much stayed the same.

The interface I am not hugely impressed with, but then I'm someone who always turns off all the shiny options in XP anyway. It does seem that it adds unnecessary overhead to most tasks though - the PC I use which has Vista is reasonably new (albeit not very good) but performs about the same speed as a PC (again, not very good) which is over a year older.

What does annoy me though is that after however many versions of DOS and Windows we've had there's still so much that simply doesn't work particularly well. With somethings, there's legal/competetion issues - Microsoft could undoubtedly make mspaint infinitely better than it is, but presumably that would piss of Adboe and FTC. So that's understandable.

But even things like copying files STILL doesn't work particularly well (using Vista to upload 5MB of files to an ftp site I use takes twice as long as using a basic freeware ftp client (not because of transfer rates, Windows just seems to ponder the question for a period). Things like mass renaming or moving large numbers of files from different sources - these are all OS functions which Vista (via the GUI) still doesn't seem to perform very well at. OK, for somethings you're not going to beat a competent Unix sysadmin on a caffeine and regex bender in terms of speed, but that's not really the issue. Most of the places I know, users have responsibility for keeping things like network drives in order and MS share some of the blame for the mess that this inevitably results in.

I've not had a chance to play around with the command shell scripting so I've no idea how that performs. In terms of the basic command prompt, I know MS are making a GUI-based product with a shell thrown in but I still don't understand why there's so little improvement been made on that front since Win2K. We all know that if you're administering a Windows based machine for long enough you'll have to mess around with command prompts, so why not make it a pleasant experience? Again, the new scripting stuff might solve all that, I've no idea.

Finally, as with all MS products made in the last 10 years, there's too much emphasis on wizards and automated graphical pop-ups. I appreciate these mostly can be turned off, but it's still a chore to have to do so. And if we are going to have processes which work like that, can we have the option to save them into a human readable plain text script job which we can edit/adjust where we need to?

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

i don't like how vista idles at roughly a gig of ram usage, it scares me.

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

Mine idles with roughly 80%-75% of my ram free, I have 2gb in total.

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

ffs man, how many times do i have to tell you why it does this and how it's a good thing? :mad:

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

you've yet to tell me how it's a good thing.

All i know is it randomly decides that programs i don't use often (IE and wmp for example) should automatically be loaded into the ram when it starts, but things i use all the time, like opera, shouldn't.

How is that better?

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If this really matters to you, take a peek at Paint.NET. It's a free Paint on steroids... perhaps more like a mini-photoshop.

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

or just use the gimp

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

I've found that I like neither, Paint.NET has great features dogged by a bad interface.

The Gimp is gimped by its use of the GTK library which again creates a terrible interface.

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

At first I hated it. Now I'm loving Vista. I still have Win XP as dualboot incase anything ever ****s up.

I don't need to have loads of bloody CD's to install all my drivers for all my hardware even for my graphics card, it seemlessly just searches the internet for my drivers and downloads them in under a minute or two (benefit of *be 24mb).

I have no performance issues with Vista, probably because of my setup. I've got 2GB of low-latency RAM which I've further set to aggressive timings and a nifty Raptor hard-drive which is fast as **** when loading games - I had a normal SATA-II drive before and I just replaced it with the raptor drive for the sake of it. I notice how programs load-up faster and game levels load-up faster.

Vista seems to load in the same time Win XP did if not a bit faster (with the same kind of startup programs).

Any programs I had issues with I've got around through the Compatability Mode option...I've only had to do this for two programs actually and that's uTorrent (don't know but it kept on freezing, put it on comp. mode and it works like a doodle) and also YzDock.

The sidebar is neat and I'm really loving it. I've lowered the opacities so they're not intrusive at all. I've got quick recycle bin, shutdown, hard-drive stats, run shortcut, nice IP tool which copies to clipboard by just clicking on it etc.

The thumbnails load up quiicckkk and I love the inbuilt support for really large thumbnails. The folders from medium size onwards will display but to 2 cropped images of images or videos from inside the folder which I like a lot. I don't have annoying thumbs.db files lying around anymore either (I had hidden files turned on).

If you people love Vista but don't have the hardware to run it, you can get a really good Vista theme now. An excellent Vista Windowsblinds theme exists which will make Windows look 'identical' to Vista (I know as I've got it on my Win XP OS). For those that don't want Windowblinds, there's a TrueTransparency program that gives the frame pure transparency like in Vista - but - it cannot blur the frame like Vista does - still, it makes up for what msstyles lack.

The tooltips feature can be downloaded, the neat way you can switch between programs and tasks can be downloaded... even the Sidebar exists (it's a patched sidebar straight from Vista itself so the gadgets intended for Vista are installable on it). Control panel modifications exist to make it look like Vista, Styler toolbars to accompany Windowblinds/msstyles themes.

Now onto the annoying things I have found so far:

The first annoying thing I found about Vista is the fact that Microsoft are ****wits for turning on UAC on by default. Everytime I customised this, installed a program, installed a driver kept asking me to give it permission. Took me quite a while to realise I could turn it off and then more annoying and wasted time trying to find the feature to turn it off only to have it tell me I have to restart. Grr.

The second is that the "up" function (to go to parent folder) in folders no longer works. Which is a real pain in the butt. The work around is to press Alt + UP. Um. NO NO NO NO NO NO. The reason why is because MS want you to use the address-bar to go to parent folder but this is long and unnecessary. No-one has figured out a way how to modify the lil arrow to go up a folder yet or modify the toolbar so a button for up can be done. I'm also suprised they never included a new folder shortcut!

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

Just single click the folder name in the address bar to go directly to that folder.

I actually find this more intuitive than the 'up' button, especially since you can infact skip straight to the parent's parent folder instead of having to click up twice etc.


As for a new folder shortcut.. i must admit it is strange windows does not include this, but then I've never noticed, I find Right Click->New->Folder or Organise->New Folder good enough for me.

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

It's totally freaking me out. They've renamed Add/Remove Programs for crying out loud!

WTF have they done to mineweeper with it's colours(!) and it's pop-up messages(!) It's hardly the end of the world but it's scary and new.

Basically my laptop broke and I needed a new PC quickly, very quickly.

I can't describe how fantastic this post is.

I must admit it isn't as terrible as it would first appear although there are loads of little things I just don't want. I have always kept the shiny things as low-key as possible and as familiar to Windows 95/98 as possible. I don't appreciate being dragged kicking and screming into the 21st century.

I have no real need for it and I just think wiping it and installing XP will make this PC run faster. However, it doesn't come with any disks but it does allow me to make my own, apparantly. But in the end I'll probably settle into this and won't bother until I run this machine into the ground. :)

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

Also, whenever I start up my computer it tells me I have 5 USB storage devices connected, they show up in 'Computer' and the 'Safely Remove Items' icon is by the clock. It's not a problem but I would like to stop it, any ideas?

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

This is a good thing, just poorly implemented.
Its about time windows started to bug people about running things as admin, and about time other software developers started working on not requiring this access to do things.
If it nagged a little less it would be good, since as things currently stand people are simply turning it ( and the protection it offers ) off because it never ever shuts up. This is also the fault of the developers of all the bits of software which seem to desire admin access too btw.

One improvement thats possible:
When installing something - windows installer has a script of all actions that its going to take. instead of bringing UAC up for all of them one by one - Bring it up with a list of all the actions that it will need admin for
ie "windows needs you to authorise the installation of a driver, writing files to a protected directory ( say the windows dir ), etc etc"
a single prompt window for all that with a single yes/no for all - and/or checkboxes next to each item if you dont want a particular one to occur

If they'll fix UAC in SP1, i dont know. They're refusing to admit the existance of a service pack in development incase it puts business customers off buying it till it arrives.
Ofc the smart businesses are already doing this after having been burnt with windows XP.

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

It'll be available on the 16th of this month, I think. It was announced today and I found it whilst reading up on Vista. A version of it has already been leaked so if you want to install it, go nuts! Whether this is the final version or not remains to be seen. Personally, I'm going to wait.

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

Yeah. Download Tweak VI (by TotalIdea). Get the Basic version (not worth paying for it) and there's a function in it to hide whatever drives you don't want to appear :)

EDIT: I don't know if this is a permanent fix like the above program is, but have you tried right click one of them and doing "Safely Remove" or "Disconnect" ?

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

It will probably be a memory card reader. One of these 5-in-1 things. It appears as 5 seperate drives to windows and probably is usb connected

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Re: Oh. My. God.
 

While I generally agree on the whole, I don't believe its entirely the fault of app devs doing things they shouldn't. It would seem that UAC freaks out occasionally about things writing to the registry in general. Seeing as 99.99% of apps are relient on the registry to store settings its a bit ludicrous.

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

the solution is a simple text file to store settings a-la- /etc/ in *nix that could easily go in /documents and settings/username/application data/app
Heck it could even be xml formatted to make it that bit nicer to automatically validate format and parse. ( with the added bonus of making it that little bit easier to port if you want to since flatfile settings storage is pretty universal )

There isnt any real need to be storing things in the registry ( and thus memory resident ) - settings least of all which only really get accessed on startup,settings change and saving
I agree that UAC should be tweaked so that it doesnt go mental about programs writing to the registry ( at least, to the registry in their own section of it - and not anything system wide ) but there are ways of doing things that dont involve this as a workaround

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

MS is clearly steering away from this "store settings in the registry" thing. It's simply a bad programming habit.
Most notable is the built in setting object in .NET applications created with Visual Studio. It allows you to add application and user settings with a few clicks. These settings are then stored in XML files with your app or in your documents and settings folder.
UAC is whining for a good reason, the problem though is the tonnes of legacy applications that still abuse the registry for storing settings.

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

So UAC giving me repeated messages when I wanted to copy some files over from one drive to another is a good thing? It doesn't help when I get further pop-ups about some files already existed which isn't by an extra pop-up when folders already exist too.

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

that's not UAC doing that. christ knows what it is

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

Its not UAC, the popups that he is referring to is the standard windows notification dialogue box.

IE:

There is already a file with the same name in this location.

-> Copy and Replace
(overwrite old file with new one)

-> Don't Copy
(leave old file alone)

-> Copy, but keep both files
(rename the file being copied)


by default it will popup with this dialogue everytime it encounters a file or folder that already exists in the new location. All he needs to do is tick the box at the bottom that says "Do this for the next (x) conflicts"

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

Can I hide/delete the two desktop.ini files on my desktop without having to hide all system files?

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

You could try deleting them ;-)

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

I hate to say it, but I'm slowly being won over to Vista.

When you rename a file, it doesn't select the file extension. How awsome is that!

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

Wait; i'm terrible with the in-depth sort of stuff. I need a very basic question answered.

I use XP; and things on my desktop annoy me - i try and keep it to 6 items maximum otherwise it pisses me off. I hate toolbars, sidebars, any icons in the taskbar besides the clock.

Is Vista just a whole load of unneccesary short cuts cluttering up my screen? (just as anything other than IE or a browser set to look like IE (with nothing on it and no faggot options) is completely unneccesary)

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

you can have as much or as little clutter as you want, to the same extent as XP. The Sidebar can be turned off and the Start bar is the same only a bit cooler-looking.


edit: http://img262.imageshack.us/img262/1079/vistagv5.png

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

Don't worry, you can change the Start bar as well. ;)

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

Also, the recycle bin looks shit.

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

You can change that sort of thing, you know.

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

has anybody ever told you your life is petty, mundane and probably not worthy of the continuing struggle to breathe in air?

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

You can't change that using Windows Vista, can you? :(

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

Told me? They bought me a 'My life is petty, mundane and probably not worthy of the continuing struggle to breathe in air' T-shirt. The funny thing is though, the writing was all backwards so it only makes sense when I look in the mirror.

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

OK. When I go to set a picture as a background it just stays the same.

Edit: In 'Themes' it previews my desktop with the pic. What's up wit that?

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

XP, 2000, ME, NT, 98 and 95 ( possibly 3.1 too ) did that as well.
It will only select the file extention if you actually turn on "show file extentions" as an option

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

Gay featured found:

iTunes & Quicktime seem to disable transparency = gay.

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

itunes and quicktime use their own stying engine. Does it disable transparency for everything else ( which would be gay ) , or just for them apps?
Either case, the blame lies with apple

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

It disables the entire transparency within the vista styling engine and changes it to the Vista basic theme (the equivalent of those who just meet the minimum requirements for Vista and those on Home Basic OS flavour) until you close iTunes and/or Quicktime (depending on whether either or both are open).

According to so many forums I have looked into, it's common as hell. There is a really small proportion of people who claim not to be affected by this bug which Apple do know about but are still yet to fix it despite versions 7.2 and 7.3 being released being classed as Vista compatible.

EDIT: amazingly I have found a link that apparently gets around it! for anyone interested this link explains how to get past the bug and gives an explaination too.

This is gay though and Apple should have addressed this is as a fix as standard. I don't know if it works though I shall report back in a bit.

I've also found Limewire does the same Aero disabling thingy but haven't found a workaround based on the above linkage.

EDIT #2: the fix seems to work so far! just a shame limewire is still being gay though

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

I like to 'show file extensions'. With Vista I am showing file extensions, it's just thatfile extensions. I have it enabled on Vista but when I click rename, the file extension is automatically not selected so there's no fuss.

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

I've just removed Quicktime, downloaded quicktime alternative v1.8 and just found a forum where someone strips the installer of QuickTime. It's all good.

Cool feature found:

Google.

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

These kind of threads always remind me how geeky people can be. I mean seriously, is it THAT important whether a program you use on the computer has transparency or not? It doesn't affect the functionality of it at all, does it...?

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

worrying about transparency does not a geek make.
Worrying about the lack of a decent command line interface to things on the other hand...

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

Don't use Limewire. There is no valid reason in existence why anyone should choose to use Limewire over torrents.

Re: Oh. My. God.
 

1. You don't need to trawl through the torrent sites for whatever it is you want.
2. You can just search quickly and easily for single songs or whatever, instead of searching for an album and checking the song is on that album.
3. Some people can't be bothered to go through the rigmarole of finding a torrent, saving the torrent, opening the torrent in utorrent or whatever they use, then waiting for it to complete.
4. In my personal experience, when I download torrents, it uses up nearly all of my bandwidth and slows everything else down (which is nice if something is downloading quickly, but does mean I can't play games or whatnot). Limewire doesn't do that, as it's kind of slow.


Having made those points though, I still prefer torrents over Limewire. I was just demonstrating that you're wrong :)