Where is windows going - have they lost the plot?

[Deanodarlo]

Well look at the direction the Windows family is heading - this whole bland, grey and light blue with "pretty" icons thing can kiss my arse. It's like staring at the front of a bare refrigerator door.

Every release seems to follow a rule. Windows eats ram but still does the same job with one exception - it somehow manages to make the most simple of tasks annoying to anyone who's got half a brain when it comes to computers.

And as long as I'm ranting I'd like to say something more about those "we hid your crap" thingies - THEY SUCK!! When an OS take it's liberty and starts messing with my settings I get pissed. Very pissed. Not to mention all the settings are hidden.

Stuff that should be in Control Panel (like Network Properties) isn't (you have to right click on Network Neighbourhood, and then click a couple of other things). Wizards for the most simple task, grrr...ahhhhhh!!! JUST GIMME A PANEL SO I CAN ENTER THE SETTINGS I WANT. NOOOOO. DON'T DO THAT. YES OF COURSE I'M SURE. Why is my Internet connection having a fit?; My hard drives going nuts for no reason? Need a patch for my motherboard to run in 'real dos' at startup. Hang on a minute, WHERE IS DOS? - AHHHHHH!HEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLP!

In their install set-ups they should start adding 'novice intermediate and expert' user options to stop this crap trend, instead of leaving us to play 'hide and seek' with EVERY stupid option - 'Intelligent menus', yeah right - or is it twenty more clicks to open my applications?

Am I alone here or are others beginning to crack-up?

 

[cmv]

You're beginning to crack up. Windows 2000 is simply awesome compared to past releases of NT, 9x, and of course 3.x and this is coming from someone who doesn't particularly like Windows.

Personally I think it is a good idea to have a rather bland desktop as the default. Some people like loading up their desktops with themes, huge background images, and sounds but this isn't for everyone. Some people have vision problems and are more concerned with getting the fonts bumped up, etc. Personally I like a nice bland Windows desktop .

Also with Windows 2000 it is slight annoying to go to the control panel and then have to go to system but it really is a good idea. At least now most of the crap is in that one menu and you don't have to hunt it down elsewhere.

If you're talking about the 9x or whistler than go to Win2k. That other stuff is crap.

 

[JellyBaby]

You may be expecting too much. What is any OS anyway? Something that manages files and runs your programs. Anything else is gravy.

M$ has a challenge: they've got to consider the installed user base in any new/upgraded OS while adding enough "new stuff" to sucker folks like you into upgrading. It's not easy.

Anyway, look for Whistler to require more RAM and a bit more processor. After all, hardware sales are sagging and need a boost.

 

[Need4Speed]

LOL....better settle down though before you blow a gasket. I'd have to agree though..way too many hiddens settings.

 

[cmv]

I too think there are too many hidden settings (the registry is a pain in the butt). But what else is new with Windows? It has always been like that (since 9x at least)...

 

[cmv]

Is Whistler Windows 9x code or Windows 2000 code? Or some of both?

 

[cirrus1]

It's based on the NT kernel

 

[stash]

Where is DOS??

Who cares?? Give me a command prompt, and I can do anything those pretty little wizards can do, but in half the time. Win2k is by far MS's best yet.

 

[airfoil]

I agree! Windows has revolutionized the PC market and it is the way it is today because of Microsoft/Windows. Perhaps Deanodarlo should try a MAC or switch to Linux and get a feel of that!

 

[BOFH]

For those of you too young or who were not using computers at the time, I'll toss in some comments from someone who remembers. Windows at one time was a very usefull and nice solution. It made it possible to do with a 'cheap' pc things that formally had been the exclusive domain of high end unix boxen. The problem is that their advantage has since left them starting shortly after the Win95 launch. Since then, open unix's have greatly improved their toolset and Mac's have stayed a bit more exspensive than a PC and more niche too. MS has brought out newer OS's, but they're all mostly focused on catching/stomping out Unix (nt 3.5(1.0)) on or adding flashy stuff and bugfixes(win98 etc). They currently seem to be in a holding pattern raking in the money on their Office liscenses (why else would you change the file format every 2 versions?) and adding stuff to media player. Of course this is all just MHO

although I don't agree with every conclusion drawn in this artivle, it adds more detail to what I said above.

http://www.osopinion.com/perl/story/6935.html

 

[Biggs]

Welcome to the world of bloatware.

 

[Elledan]

Gotta agree with Biggs, every new version of Windows seems to require at least the double amount of CPU speed, RAM and video memory.

Heck, I even ran Win95 on my 486DX @66 MHz and it ran (kinda) fine. Then Win98 on a 400 MHz PC, since that one requires at least a 133 proc to run faster than Win95 on a 386SX 15MHz

My brother tried WinME on his PC for one day. Let me just tell you that:

1)The thing crashed at least every 10 minutes
2)It ran very slow (64 MB RAM)
3)I've never seen such an enormous amount of BloatWare(c)
4)The Control Panel made me nearly faint: Only six (6) options I counted before I started to feel really sick
5)I think that WinME really deserves the name 'Win98 Moron Edition'

Only Win2k is the exception on the BloatWare(c) OS's coming from M$.

 

[JellyBaby]

Yep I think MS's future hinges on Whistler. If it gets a bad rap and folks feel it's another Win ME, MS is screwed. But of course it will be out by Xmas, ready or not (to satisfy shareholders). It'll be interesting.

 

[cmv]

First off I would *NEVER* use any version of Windows on a server. My servers run OpenBSD, FreeBSD, or a variant of Linux (RedHat, Slackware, or Debian). I use Windows on the desktop. In my opinion Windows 2000 is Microsofts best but it still sucks of course. But everything sucks for the desktop at the moment. Gnome and KDE take up tons of memory when run under linux. I'm sure we'll get that fixed soon but right now a Windows 2000 desktop with IE 5.5/Outlook Express, etc. consumes less memory than an X Window System desktop.

It pains me to say it but it is true... At least with Gnome. I'm going to go try KDE again (haven't used it in ages) and see how that does...

For linux to become my desktop again I need:
1) anti-aliased fonts - and they are here! X 4.0.2 includes the render extension, Qt libs have been hacked to support it, freetype2 also, and thus you can have KDE with anti-aliased fonts! gnome is coming soon
2) a good browser (as good as IE) - and it is coming! slowly but surely Mozilla is cranking away. if you haven't tried it recently (and no, the .7 and milestone releases don't count, go get a nightly build right now) you will be impressed
3) a good GUI IMAP email client - this isn't quite as important, I can use mutt for imap mail. right now though all the GUI email clients under linux that support IMAP don't seem to cache the IMAP folders or anything so it really sucks... I haven't tried them all (yet) so maybe there is a good one that really works well with IMAP...

In short Windows 2000 won't be on my desktop for long... I don't really need it. Anti-aliased fonts though... That is good news to me .

 

[cmv]

.

 

[Noriaki]

Win ME crossed sooooo many lines!!!!

Does anyone know, does Whistler have the look and feel of Win2000?
I like the look of Win2000...winME is just sick....

I might just have to go Win2000..but since I have to buy a new one anyways I'd like to hold out for a while and get the newer version...but is Whistler going to be filled with crappy things like WinME is?

 

[MGMorden]

CMV: I agree with many of your points but it seems like Konqueror will be the best IE-ish browser. Mozilla is good (I keep it installed on my system), but seems to keep that "Netscape feel". There's nothing wrong with that. Netscape for Windows is a great product. Konqueror on the other hand feels (to me) more like IE. They've got a few problems to work out still (https support, fonts not changing briefly when a link is clicked, better java support, etc), but it's on it's way.

BTW, you should try KDE now. The KDE2 series is MUCH better than KDE1 was. I used to use Window Maker before KDE2. This new one does follow the KDE trend of looking like Windows though (I'm running CVS from just a few days ago and there's an option to make all the title bars just like Win2k). Of course I don't see this as a bad thing. Some people aren't running from Windows the OS as much as they are running from Microsoft itself. Many of these people just want an alternative and if KDE2 looks like Windows, with that oh-so wonderful Linux underneath, then they are more likely to accept the OS.

 

[UnixFreak]

this is one of the reasons why the open-source community has grown so well lately, while windows has its strong points, its weak points are too much for users such as myself, and people are starting to look towards other options. This has put MS in high gear (the propaganda machine, at least) Hopefully, they will improve quality and useablity of their OS, as a result, at least for the more knowledgeable users.


No, I am not trying to start a political war here, (I am kinda tired of those lately) just stating my opinion.

 

[Viperoni]

I dunno what kinda stuff you guys are on, but my WinME ran rock solid on my Duron 935 (from 650) system.....and it locked MANY times due to (unknown at the time) a Mx300 incompatibility problem.

2 months straight, 12 horus a day, everyday, rock solid.
No complaints here!

But I love win2k on my bp6 machine though

 

[cmv]

Yeah I hear you about Mozilla but the look and feel will be a completely different ball park when they finalize on a release. Due to the open source nature of the project tons of people are going to be grabbing code out of mozilla and enhancing it for their own uses! I wouldn't be too surprised if some point in time the backend of mozilla is used for konqueror... Might be a while but I think it is a definate possibility...

I'm going to try KDE2 ASAP. I'm just getting Debian up and going, hehe... I've got a linux based answering machine using vgetty, it's really cool, does caller id, etc, saves messages to the disk. Then I have a script that converts them to mp3 files using lame and the --preset phone option. I've just got to finish up a PHP/MySQL based frontend to the whole thing so it is easier to use... No more crappy "you've got 10 voice mails" and having to listen to them all ...

 

[MGMorden]

Actually, they've already managed to get the Mozilla rendering engine into Konqueror if you want that. I havne't looked into it much, but they do have screen shots some where on konqueror.org.

 

[BehindEnemyLines]

Just my two cents. Don't want any trouble but Win Me runs rock solid for 2-3 months on my system. Sometimes an illegal operation would appear but it does not bring down the whole system like Win98SE. I used to use Win98SE and I like Win Me better. What can I say, very little BSOD and IO after disabling all those default programs and settings.

System:
WinMe Final
Celeron 533
128 Meg RAM
Voodoo 3 3000 pci
Intel i810 chipset

I think it all depends on your system configuration, but then Microsoft should make an OS that would work on "all" systems.

 

[MGMorden]

But as you said very little BSOD and IO errors. With Win2k I haven't gotten either in about 4 months (the most trouble I've had out of it is sometimes it takes a while for the "Saving your settings " shutdown box to go away, but it always completes, it has never hung there. A lot of Win9x users seem to have have this notion that as long as a system remains usable then it's "rock solid". Truly rock solid means no BSOD's, not few of them.

 

[BehindEnemyLines]

MGMorden,

If you say it that way, then "rock solid" should be no BSOD and IO. I agree with that, I see some improvement over Win98SE. I do not have win2000 so can't really tell how well it runs.

 

[nweaver]

Hey, I am a tech Support agent, and although I run 2K at home, me is easier for jo blow from the Backwoods, redneck Hillbilly to run, and that is who ms is targeting. It is easier to talk them through their system to fix it too. My sis had win98, and was having trouble, so she just went to dos, del *.* and kabloowey, MS guts scattered everywhere. Can't do that unless you know how to in ME. And it seems more stable then 98 or se.