The thing I probably resent most about Windows Vista is that it’s an unimaginably vast missed opportunity. After five years, it essentially fixes nothing that bothered me in Windows XP.
We all have our wish-list. Mine included things like: why the heck don’t Explorer windows actually remember their settings? (There’s some sort of FIFO queue that lets XP remember only about 50 settings; open the 51st window and it’s back to defaults.) Also, why do new Explorer windows open so huge — even if they’re totally empty, or contain one or two tiny files? Why can’t I stop Windows Help from popping up whenever I inadvertently hit F1? Why does Ctrl-Del mean one thing when editing a filename, and something totally different in every other Microsoft app? Why isn’t there a way of saving the positions of desktop icons? Or the sequence of files in an Explorer window? Why don’t computers show up on the network as soon as they boot?
Etc. I won’t itemize further, or I’ll have to change the name of this list. Anyway, it’s all pretty minor stuff.
Minor, maybe… but Vista essentially fixes nothing on my XP wish-list. At first, I expected the new file Explorers would be a big improvement. “Anything would be a huge improvement,” I naively thought. “How hard can this be?” Too hard for the Vista team, I guess. The new Explorers add features I didn’t want, and which don’t really solve my fundamental problems for me. I’m not sure yet how good Vista is at remembering window settings, but it definitely doesn’t remember window positions, and it still insists on opening new Explorers at ludicrous screen-covering size. (Fortunately, Basta Computing’s indispensable ZMover still works in Vista.) Networking is the same deal as in XP, so far as I can tell. And so on.
There’s lots more things that Vista doesn’t do, but I’ll leave those to their own separate entries in this ongoing series.
