Vista Woes
Ok, so the new box has vista ultimate installed on it, with all the cpu thieving memory hogging ridiculous eye candy crap designed for 12 year old girls and marketing managers who spend their days reading “info world” they could pack in there.
Yes it’s a bunch of crap. I’m assured the underlying architectural changes are worth it and it does seem more stable.
But I want my UI back.
Somewhat more articulately stated, these are a couple-few things I want that I was unable, in an hour of searching around, to find:
- STOP this crap about assuming I want a different explorer interface to a directory containing files of mostly one type. Videos, music. You shouldn’t care as an OS what the hell is in there. It’s files. I haven’t for the life of me been able to figure out how to shut that crap off.
- I need WAMP to start on startup. I most certainly do NOT need it to be blocked for “my safety”. Yes I acknowledge the yummie security features presumably designed to stop your machine from becoming a node on a botnet. But give me the override you EEDIOT! (Yes, it’s probably there. Dunno how to get to it.)
- In the same general category: Stop asking me if it’s ok to run the fucking application I just ran. YES IT’S OK YOU SMACKTARD! I RAN IT!
- Let me disable the goopy screen effects. They were cute for about 3.47 minutes. Time to go. Plain windows, plain transitions, no stupid animations. Nothing. I’m not a marketing manager in charge of business development. I did not go to SVA. I don’t care. How much cpu goes in to that damn transparent window border? It’s stupid. And while I’m on that, what’s with the damn 8-10 pixel border. Stealing my cpu and memory wasn’t enough, you feel the need to chip away at my screen real estate too?
Design is wonderful. It’s an unsung hero of technology (though less so now that Apple has brought it kicking and screaming into the forebrain of the modern western technologist.)
But good design means that things do what you expect them to do, without you expecting them to work that way. Good design removes barriers between what you really want and implementing that vision. That’s all.
It’s not flashy bells & whistles. It’s not funny noises and different shaped start buttons.
Yes, windows need to look like SOMEthing, audible indicators have to have SOME sound. There’s no such thing as “no” design, so yes, you might as well make it look good. And don’t get me wrong, these things do look good. They’re pretty slick.
But if all I see when I sit down at my box is the glare of my “up all night long” old navy coffee mug pajama bottoms and the desktop icons peeking through the border to firefox as I type this, then the computer is no longer serving my purpose. It’s totally diverting my attention from what I’m doing, which would be writing some innocuous blog posting about a couple vista tweak questions and forcing me to concentrate on and evoke some no-longer-so-latent anger about software bloat, “flashy and ineffective” architecture, and why I have a near pathological hatred for doing gui development work.
Uhm…
yeah…
so, if you know how to tweak those Vista settings that would be great.
And if you can send me a tarred and feathered Monkey Boy that’d be nice too. I’m rearranging my apartment and he’d make a great sculpture.
miserable prick.
UPDATE: Jesus I just figured it out. Windows Vista’s security and incessant confirmation dialogs make it the Alan Alda of operating systems.
Tags: UCCU