Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> In this case, it seemed to be the "superfetch" service. 
> I think there's some sort of priority-inversion bug, whereby you start 
> reading a big file and superfetch comes in and says "Let me read-ahead that 
> for you", but superfetch runs at a low priority and you wind up waiting on 
> superfetch.

  Only remotely related, but one thing which annoys me a lot in XP is that
the search function of Windows Explorer just doesn't work.

  There is an option to search the contents of all the files for the
searched string. However, for whatever reason, it just doesn't work, period.
If I search for a string which exists in a file in the current directory,
it just doesn't find it.

  Maybe it just doesn't search inside files which do not have a "known
extension" (ie. .txt, .doc, etc).

  This is especially annoying when I'm trying to find which C++ source
file uses something specific. In unix I just run a grep. In Windows the
Windows Explorer is completely useless, and trying to run a for-while
command in the command prompt is really laborious (especially since
I don't have a command prompt running all the time in the directory
in question).

> Four, the new Media Center is in some ways more annoying and in some ways 
> less annoying. I can't tell if it's just because I haven't used it enough to 
> learn where everything went or whether it's just not meshing with me.

  The Windows Media Player (and I suppose they changed it to "Media Center"
later) is the quintessential example of using eyecandy at the cost of a
good user interface.

  Media Player 6 had a completely bare-bones ascetical user interface. But
it was clear, concise and easy to use. Buttons looked like standard buttons,
and their roles were obvious. Menus were standard menus, and they contained
concise and clear menu items. The whole thing had a look&feel and worked
exactly in the same way as all the other standard Windows applications,
which made it clear, intuitive and easy to use.

  But no, this is not good in the eyes of Microsoft. "This is a multimedia
player! It has to look fancy! It needs eyecandy!" The next version of the
program was just plain horrible, unintuitive and difficult to use. And from
there it went worse with each new version.

  No wonder the popular "Media Player Classic" is based on the UI of Media
Player 6. It simply didn't have any crap. It was clean and simple.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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