Windows 7 Annoyances

Of Bugs and Features

The point of this book is to help you solve problems. Sometimes those problems are the result of bad design, such as the aforementioned shortcomings of Windows 7’s search tool, and sometimes the problems are caused by bugs.

Take the Blue Screen of Death, a Windows mainstay for more than a decade. Yes, it’s still alive and well in Windows 7, but now it has a cousin: the Green Ribbon of Death. As explained in Chapter 2, the Green Ribbon of Death—capable of bringing Windows Explorer to its knees—comes from a combination of poor design and bugs in its code. And thus the reason for distinguishing where an annoyance becomes clear: you need to know what you’re dealing with in order to fix it.

The User Account Control (UAC) feature in Windows 7 is a perfect example of a feature gone awry. Most of the time, UAC does precisely what it was designed to do—prevent programs from doing harm to your PC, occasionally asking your permission when it deems it appropriate to do so—but the result is a system that frequently bothers you with UAC prompts (although mercifully less than Vista) while intermittently breaking older applications without telling you why. Because this behavior isn’t caused by a bug per se, fixing the problem is instead just a matter of tweaking a few features to better suit your needs.

This inevitably leads to an important conclusion: one person’s annoyance is another’s feature. Although Microsoft may be motivated more by profit than excellence, often leading to products designed for the lowest common denominator, you’re not bound to that fate. In other words, you should not be required to adjust the way you think in order to complete a task on your computer; rather, you should learn how to adjust the computer to work in a way that makes sense to you.

But I prattle on. Feel free to dive into any part of the book and start eliminating annoyances.