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My Thoughts on Windows
Posted by Scott August 17th, 2006 | 5,253 words |

Microsoft Windows XP - the latest and greatest?

I run Windows XP on a secondary partition on my laptop. I use it at work, and get just enough time in it to
realize how stupid it is! Seriously! I’m not even talking about the coding
aspects of the operating system. I’m talking about the totally rediculous
everyday stupidities in this program we all use at one point or another.

Windows XP, the windows "XP-erience". Come with me and I’ll show you memories from my Windows experiences.

Let’s jump right in, shall we? We begin our Microsoft Windows XP-erience by logging on and
getting to the desktop. Wow, what a beautiful background Micrososft gave
us! My mouth dropps open as I gasp at it’s beauty! I haven’t seen a hill
like this since Teletubbies! This looks like the kind of wallpaper I
want to use. I’m really glad Microsoft chose such a professional looking
default wallpaper for their newest operating system.

Who can resist those incredible color schemes! Blue, white, red, and green - colors this vivid are rarely
seen outside of Toys’R'Us! Leave it to Microsoft to create a professional
looking (but somehow ‘fitting’) color scheme for their wonderful new lines
of operating systems. Uhoh, take a look at the height of the default window
decorations. I want to find the complete moron who thought up THAT idea.
"Maybe if we make the title bar 25px high, it’ll be a completely
usesless waste of space and make our OS look a lot more childlike".

Ok, the default windows background sucks BIG TIME. Let’s take a look at out alternatives! Upon a quick inspection,
you’ll find a plethora of ghastly wallpapers that you can use
for your system! They’re 100% free too! Now you can pick between bubbles,
bricks, pink swirles, or greyish brown chinese fans! (pictured here)

Open up any folder or drive in the windows explorer window and selec help. One of the options you’ll see is "Is this
copy of Windows legal?". You can follow the steps to see if your
version of Windows is legitimate. If it is, you’re a retard.

I don’t know about you, but I feel the windows XP icon sets are an insult ot my intelligence. However, let’s take a closer look:

topleft - (display settings) what’s with the paint?

topright - (hardware) who the heck has a combo. printer/mouse?

midleft - (sound) a golfclub a suction cup. big deal

midright - (users) oh yeah, that looks mature.

botleft - (space) wow, that looks like my 2nd grade math book

botright - (date) who has a callendar with 14 days on it?

In the find dialogues, you always get incredibly helpful little assistants that watch you while you search. No one really
knows what they do. But becide taking up cpu you could be using
to quicken your search, that processing power is put into animating these
incredibly professional looking 3d assistants.

Let’s say I want to switch users. Cool.

Q: How do I switch users without logging off?

A: Click LogOff, then "Switch User"

we’re back to wallpapers! My my, look at these beauties that Microsoft hid from the world by stashing it in the "my pictures"
folder. Who the heck uses the "my pictures" folder anyway? I
want to see the person who got these pictures. They’re too high contrast
to use as wallpapers! crazyness!

Ok, I know you’ve all XP-erienced it. You go to copy a file, it gets tou bout 99% complete then it says you have a GAZILLION minutes
remaining in your file transfer. Anyone know what causes this? It’s been
happening since windows 95. And no one seems to be able to fix it.

Let’s take a quick look at the new screensavers that windows xp provides us after it’s 200$ pricetag!

wha… what? Only one new screen saver? oh man, it must be SWEET!

::blink:: That’s the screensaver? Wow, imagine the coding behind that one.

Windows XP supports the NTFS filesystem. I personally have lost about 6 gigs of data (Japanese Mp3s) using NTFS when the power went
out. Apparently, NTFS has a "slight drawback" in the sense that
if power to the hard drive is cut while it’s writing to the disk, data
loss occurrs. It can sometimes fix it at boot, but sometimes fails or
just doesn’t see the problem at all. For XP, I use the FAT filesystem.
However I think it’s funny. This bloated filesystem that’s so big and
clunky is named FAT!

I could write an entire page about the stupidities of internet Explorer.

So you load a wallpaper or big image and - oops! it’s stretched so it doesn’t run off the page. It’s not anti aliased and it looks horrible

you can fix the image by hoving off the image, hovering back on, waiting 4 seconds, and clicking the bottom right of the image. What
a stupid thing to do! If you’re going to include image resizing, make
it anti alised, and make it so clicking the image will size it back
to purportion. Mozilla’s Firebird browser has this feature just right.

So you want to shut down your computer.

Great.

Just wait 10 or 15 seconds for your processor to crank out 20 fullscreen bitmaps slowly fading your current desktop to black and white. Why do
you want the fade? no clue. Why do we want black and white in the first
place?!

You should be a good person and update Windows regularly.

Why?

BECAUSE WINDOWS SUCKS.

Read the updates (for once). It’s discusting how bad these ‘mild problems’ are that Windows Update fixes really are.

Windows XP supports Windows Media Player 9! WOW! I’ll bet Windows Media Player 9 is packed with TONS of really cool features! Just
take a look at the Media guide! Well, you don’t have a choice. It loads
automatically every time you load the player. It takes 10-15 seconds to
load because of it too. But something that takes that long to load must
be a killer media guide! Just look how informative the text is! And observe
how beautifully it fits inside the player with minimal scrolling.

We all know how to get to Windows Update - but what the heck is the "windows catalog" and who has ever
clicked that icon? Anyone?

A microsoft employee must have been pretty gosh darn bored out of his mind to put Volume Control under the Entertainment section.