So I've written a few programs, finished setting up the machine, all that. 
I've only run across a couple of annoyances so far.

One, Microsoft's ass-brain decision that the standard per-file backup 
software should skip over files whose extension they don't recognise. So you 
tell it to back up everything, and it skips .exe files, .php files, etc. It 
only backs up "documents".  Huh?  Makes it utterly useless and to be coded 
around. So I wrote a script using vshadow.exe and robocopy to back up my 
home directory. Unfortunately, it isn't integrated into the "previous 
versions" the way the usual backup is.  Weirdness.

Two, when making copies of big files (by which I mean multiple files of tens 
of gig each), it'll sometimes just ... stop for a couple of minutes. It 
always comes back, but for a few minutes it'll putter along at 3MB/sec or 
so. Fortunately, the built-in resource monitor will tell you which processes 
are reading from or writing to which files and at what speed, and the task 
manager will tell you which services are running in which tasks. (Annoyingly 
(but for understandable reasons) you can have one process running a dozen 
unrelated services.) 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. "net stop superfetch" before starting backups seems to 
completely cure the problem, but it certainly took a while to figure out 
what was causing it.

Three, if you have two screens configured, and your video game starts up 
full-screen at a smaller resolution on one of the screens, it seems to punt 
your icons and taskbar around to undesirable places.   I never used dual 
screens under XP, so I don't know if this is usual, but I almost never had a 
screen-size change (via RDP for example) mess up my icons on XP.

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.

Five, as everyone says, tracking down how to set up your internet connection 
manually is rather a PITA. So far it has been a dozen clicks thru screens to 
try to guess whether it's "configure network hardware" or "set up a network" 
or "create a connection" or what. WTF guys?

Six, after you do something system-maintenancy (like chkdsk), stuff can get 
a bit ... slow. I think chkdsk does something like writing a bunch of 
changes to the journal on the disk, then finishes, and lets the next sync 
take care of dumping gigabytes to the disk or something. This, of course, 
makes the system rather unresponsive if you're trying to do something else 
disky. But, really, that's only after as administrator you say "go repair 
something", so it would seem to be pretty OK, if you ask me. BTW, if you 
plug an XP external drive into a Vista system (via USB, say), it'll be 
read-only until you run chkdsk /f on it. If you plug from Vista back to XP, 
it'll thrash a while, because XP doesn't understand Vista's volume shadows, 
so it goes through and deletes them.

Seven, some of the stuff you'd think would have a progress bar annoyingly 
doesn't. Apparently it's because the algorithms have changed and they can no 
longer figure out in advance how long something will take, but it's still 
annoying. :-)

Otherwise, so far, I rather like it. I have the task bar on the right edge 
of my left screen, and the sidebar on the right edge of the right screen, 
and I get plenty of room for everything. I can see why people like 
dual-screen work. I'm hoping I don't get durango-neck. (Program on one of 
these http://www.sydex.com/durango/durango.html for a week, and you'll see 
what I mean.)

I need to see if Second Life stops sucking when you get a high end computer 
with high-end graphics, or whether the problem really is their bandwidth.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

Post a reply to this message

Oh, and it looks like the CPU clock speed gets turned up pretty much 
instantly when you start a compute-bound process, so unless Tom's Hardware 
was running performance tests on a laptop without setting it to "high 
performance" first, it looks like that wasn't why their tests showed it 
CPU-slower.  Why it would be, I don't know, except I had a bad combination 
of drivers that was making something in the audio system suck up like 7% CPU 
time, audio conflicting with disk drive RAID or something weird, but I'd 
think they'd have looked at the performance of an "idle" system and said 
"Gee, there's something odd there." Or at least have mentioned it, if they 
didn't take time to fix it first.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

Post a reply to this message

> One, Microsoft's ass-brain decision that the standard per-file backup 
> software should skip over files whose extension they don't recognise. So 
> you tell it to back up everything, and it skips .exe files, .php files, 
> etc. It only backs up "documents".  Huh?  Makes it utterly useless and to 
> be coded around. So I wrote a script using vshadow.exe and robocopy to 
> back up my home directory. Unfortunately, it isn't integrated into the 
> "previous versions" the way the usual backup is.  Weirdness.

I experienced something similar in an old version of Windows (can't remember 
which one), now I have a directory full of old programming projects (for 
some old Borland IDE) with no built .exes to run :-(

> Two, when making copies of big files (by which I mean multiple files of 
> tens of gig each), it'll sometimes just ... stop for a couple of minutes. 
> It
...
> superfetch. "net stop superfetch" before starting backups seems to 
> completely cure the problem, but it certainly took a while to figure out 
> what was causing it.

Aha I'll have to try that, maybe it's also why when copying big files (like 
2-6 Gig for me) to a memory stick or from one partition to another it goes 
*really* slow too.

> Three, if you have two screens configured, and your video game starts up 
> full-screen at a smaller resolution on one of the screens, it seems to 
> punt your icons and taskbar around to undesirable places.   I never used 
> dual screens under XP, so I don't know if this is usual, but I almost 
> never had a screen-size change (via RDP for example) mess up my icons on 
> XP.

I think it depends on the game, some games seem to happily use a smaller 
resolution and your desktop icons are fine, others will somehow (I guess) 
change the desktop resolution as a way of using a smaller resolution 
themselves.  I'm sure it's in the MS knowledge base somewhere about the 
right and wrong ways to do it.  FWIW my DirectX programs I've written that 
run full-screen don't mess up the icons, maybe it's an OpenGL problem?

> Five, as everyone says, tracking down how to set up your internet 
> connection manually is rather a PITA. So far it has been a dozen clicks 
> thru screens to try to guess whether it's "configure network hardware" or 
> "set up a network" or "create a connection" or what. WTF guys?

Oh I never had to mess about with that yet, I just double clicked the 
wireless network icon down the bottom right and it asked me which netowrk to 
connect to, and then for the password.  Has worked flawlessly since.

> BTW, if you plug an XP external drive into a Vista system (via USB, say), 
> it'll be read-only until you run chkdsk /f on it. If you plug from Vista 
> back to XP, it'll thrash a while, because XP doesn't understand Vista's 
> volume shadows, so it goes through and deletes them.

Hmm interesting as I was thinking of getting an external USB drive, is this 
formatted with FAT32 or NTFS, does it make a difference?

> and I get plenty of room for everything. I can see why people like 
> dual-screen work. I'm hoping I don't get durango-neck.

I have two screens, but one is connected to my Vista machine and the other 
to my XP laptop.  I use a program called Input Director that allows the 
mouse/keyboard to work on both like it was one machine - even copy & paste 
works across monitors which is really cool.

Post a reply to this message

"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message 
news:49380a3f$1@news.povray.org...
> 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. "net stop superfetch" before starting backups seems 
> to completely cure the problem, but it certainly took a while to figure 
> out what was causing it.
>

You may also want to disable the indexing service. It makes searching faster 
but just about everything else slower.

Post a reply to this message

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gail [mailto:gail (at) sql in the wild (dot) co [dot] za]
> You may also want to disable the indexing service. It makes searching
> faster
> but just about everything else slower.

I'm thinking about disabling it anyway... it doesn't search particularly 
fast as it is.

...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

Post a reply to this message

"Chambers" <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote in message 
news:0EB3F944497E4F269DF0B8D18BDA05AC@HomePC...
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Gail [mailto:gail (at) sql in the wild (dot) co [dot] za]
>> You may also want to disable the indexing service. It makes searching
>> faster
>> but just about everything else slower.
>
> I'm thinking about disabling it anyway... it doesn't search particularly
> fast as it is.

I've had it off for quite a while, and the searching isn't noticably slow 
without it.
But then I don't often do searches over large parts of the drive.

Post a reply to this message

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

Post a reply to this message

"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> a écrit dans le message de 
news:49390ecc@news.povray.org...
>  Maybe it just doesn't search inside files which do not have a "known
> extension" (ie. .txt, .doc, etc).

See http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309173
I sort of understand why they hid the feature for regular (i.e. non 
programmer) users, but hiding it so deep it that needs a KB article to fix 
is indeed annoying.

G.

Post a reply to this message

Gilles Tran wrote:

> See http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309173
> I sort of understand why they hid the feature for regular (i.e. non 
> programmer) users, but hiding it so deep it that needs a KB article to 
> fix is indeed annoying.

Looks more like it's designed to be able to find "text" in arbitrary 
file types (e.g., a PDF document or a ZIP file or something) and hence 
needs to know how to access it. But yeah, that's still fairly dumb...

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:
> Aha I'll have to try that, maybe it's also why when copying big files 
> (like 2-6 Gig for me) to a memory stick or from one partition to another 
> it goes *really* slow too.

I'd be interested to hear your results.

> I think it depends on the game, 

Thief 3 (Deadly Shadows) seems to do it. (All I have is the demo. Steam'ing 
it this weekend, I expect. :-)

It also takes a relatively long time to load, and it won't let you alt-tab 
out. (It iconifies, then comes back and takes focus again. Very annoying. At 
least you can save wherever you want.)  I tend to play on the PC games that 
I can play in bits while I wait for other things on the PC to finish. :-)

Maybe it's just T:DS. I've never had the problem with XP or with other 
games, so maybe it's just T:DS and not Vista.

Solution: Set the resolution of the game to match your native desktop. :-)

> Oh I never had to mess about with that yet, I just double clicked the 
> wireless network icon down the bottom right and it asked me which 
> netowrk to connect to, and then for the password.  Has worked flawlessly 
> since.

I use static IPs in my house specifically so I can connect out to my laptop 
when it's home, if I need something off it.

> Hmm interesting as I was thinking of getting an external USB drive, is 
> this formatted with FAT32 or NTFS, does it make a difference?

NTFS. Since Linux and OSX now can write to NTFS, there didn't seem to be any 
reason for me to use something else. (Of course, Linux's crufty security 
stuff makes it even more annoying that FAT32, but I only use it for 
interchange, so...)

FAT32 doesn't do shadow copies, unless you put the actual shadows on a 
different drive that's formatted NTFS, so I don't think you need to worry 
about that.  Of course, if you plug that FAT32 drive into an XP machine, 
you'll still wind up screwing up the shadow copies.

> I have two screens, but one is connected to my Vista machine and the 
> other to my XP laptop.  I use a program called Input Director that 
> allows the mouse/keyboard to work on both like it was one machine - even 
> copy & paste works across monitors which is really cool.

Funky!  I have a friend who could probably use just that.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

Post a reply to this message

Gail wrote:
> You may also want to disable the indexing service. It makes searching 
> faster but just about everything else slower.

I did that for backups, yes, but that didn't seem to be what was causing 
that particular problem.  Indexing seems to get out of the way pretty well 
in Vista, at least in my experience. Once the index is built, I haven't had 
a problem. I'm leaving it on until it actually causes a problem.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
>   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.

It is sucky, yes.  Vista seems to have improved it. :-)

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

I believe that's the case, yes. There has to be a COM class to say which 
parts of a file are text and which parts aren't. (I know I can search my 
disk for approximately any four-letter word and find it in *some* image file.)

Find yourself a copy of "Agent Ransack". It's GREP with a gui.

The other annoyance is that XP Home won't even search outside the "my 
documents" directory, even if you tell it to.

>   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.

WMP is highly configurable. You can "skin" it back to the old look, for the 
most part. But yes, most every media player I've found, including stuff like 
WinDVD and other seemingly-straightforward players, insist on giving you a 
funky interface that makes no sense. Half the time I can't even figure out 
how to drag the controls out from in front of the video.

FWIW, Media Center is unrelated to Media Player, except that it talks to WMP 
to get listings of the libraries and to actually play the content. MC will 
record TV, play music and slideshows and videos, access online videos (at 
least the ones Microsoft links in), allows plug-ins for all sorts of stuff 
like games, caller-ID, etc., works with the IR remotes, and is generally 
meant to work more as a TiVO does than WMP does. It's closer to MythTV than 
it is to iTunes, if that makes sense.

>   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.

Agreed. Every time a new WMP comes out that I have to use for whatever 
reason, I spend an hour figuring out where the menus got to and such.

But there are far worse out there. "Where's the menu?"  "See the thing that 
looks like a flip-down cover? Click there to flip it down, and the buttons 
behind it are the menu."  WTF? If I wanted my DVD player to look like a DVD 
player, I wouldn't be pushing the buttons with my mouse.  I even saw one 
that had a flashing 12:00 on it when you started it up.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

Post a reply to this message

"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message 
news:49396012@news.povray.org...

> If I wanted my DVD player to look like a DVD player, I wouldn't be pushing 
> the buttons with my mouse.  I even saw one that had a flashing 12:00 on it 
> when you started it up.

Creative Labs, by any chance?
One of their older DVD apps had an interface nearly identical to my parent's 
DVD player

Post a reply to this message

Gail wrote:
> Creative Labs, by any chance?

I don't remember. I think that's just about the time I threw it away and 
found a different program. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

Post a reply to this message

Gilles Tran wrote:

> "Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> a écrit dans le message de
> news:49390ecc@news.povray.org...
>>  Maybe it just doesn't search inside files which do not have a "known
>> extension" (ie. .txt, .doc, etc).
> 
> See http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309173
> I sort of understand why they hid the feature for regular (i.e. non
> programmer) users, but hiding it so deep it that needs a KB article to fix
> is indeed annoying.

Ohh that's what PersistentHandler is for??

Post a reply to this message

Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> But there are far worse out there. "Where's the menu?"  "See the thing that 
> looks like a flip-down cover? Click there to flip it down, and the buttons 
> behind it are the menu."  WTF? If I wanted my DVD player to look like a DVD 
> player, I wouldn't be pushing the buttons with my mouse.  I even saw one 
> that had a flashing 12:00 on it when you started it up.

  I really can't understand why the "real-world metaphor" GUI is so
popular even though every single GUI design guide I know vehemently
speaks against using that metaphor.

  Real-world devices are limited by the physical material it's made of.
There's only so far you can go with buttons, LEDs and LCDs. Probably
millions of dollars have been spent during the past decades in order to
study how to overcome the limitations of a physical device as a user
interface.

  A GUI in a computer removes most of these limitations. You are no longer
limited to having one button fixed at a certain location. You are no longer
limited to having an LCD panel fixed at a certain location, with a fixed
resolution and color depth. You are no longer constrained by the physical
size of the device (which limits how many buttons and other controls you
can put on it).

  A GUI allows you to enhance the user interface in great lengths. You can
create menus, dialogs, easy-to-use settings screens with tabs, radio
buttons, drop-down menus... you name it. It's exactly what the manufacturers
of the real devices dream of being able to do, but can't because of the
limits of the physical device.

  Yet so many software houses creating multimedia players go to great
lengths in order to *avoid* the advantages a GUI gives you, and deliberately
impose the limits of the physical device to themselves (and their users).
It makes absolutely no sense.

  The idea behind the real-world metaphor is that, in theory, the program
should be more intuitive because it works like a real device. This idea
is completely silly for two reasons:

  Firstly, people who use the media player program are more accustomed to
using GUI programs in that system (be it Windows or anything else), and a
program which looks and behaves the same way as all the other programs
would be a hundred times more intuitive for them to use than a program
which tries to poorly emulate a real device.

  Secondly, those devices are *not* that easy and intuitive to use, precisely
because of the limitations. By imposing the same limitations to your
program, you are making it equally hard to use and unintuitive as the real
device. Something you wouldn't need to do if you made your program look and
feel like all the other programs using standard user interfaces in the
system.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>  I really can't understand why the "real-world metaphor" GUI is so
> popular even though every single GUI design guide I know vehemently
> speaks against using that metaphor.

Have you read the Apple Human Interface Design Principles?  Its first
item is about using real-world metaphors.

>  Firstly, people who use the media player program are more accustomed to
> using GUI programs in that system (be it Windows or anything else)

Not if your target consumer is the computer-adverse user who is more
familiar with traditional meatspace hardware.  There's still more of them
than not.

-- 
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.freesitespace.net

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
>   I really can't understand why the "real-world metaphor" GUI is so
> popular even though every single GUI design guide I know vehemently
> speaks against using that metaphor.

Software publishers thinks is gives you less to learn. They're wrong, mind. :-)

>   Secondly, those devices are *not* that easy and intuitive to use, precisely
> because of the limitations.

That's what I think is cool about the new digital snapshot cameras that 
automate so much (focus on faces, figure out you need fill light, etc). They 
*are* a lot easier to use, without making them any more complicated. Of 
course, it can take control away when you want a night-shot of the moon or 
something, but for 95% of the photos, it's a lot easier with no extra 
complexity. *That* is how devices should be.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:
> That's what I think is cool about the new digital snapshot cameras that
> automate so much (focus on faces, figure out you need fill light, etc).
> They *are* a lot easier to use, without making them any more complicated.
> Of course, it can take control away when you want a night-shot of the moon
> or something, but for 95% of the photos, it's a lot easier with no extra
> complexity. *That* is how devices should be.

What I also think is cool is that, if set to the correct mode, those cameras
STILL give experts enough knobs and switches to get that other 5% right :)

I have a somewhat-old digital camera that is pretty simple to use when
point-and-shoot'ing. Yet I'm told it came with TWO manuals!

Post a reply to this message

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Warp [mailto:war### [at] tagpovrayorg]
>   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.

This is true in Vista as well.  As near as I can determine, it only
searches the filenames, and I can't figure out how to search contents.

...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

Post a reply to this message

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chambers [mailto:ben### [at] pacificwebguycom]
> This is true in Vista as well.  As near as I can determine, it only
> searches the filenames, and I can't figure out how to search contents.

Wouldn't you know that after I posted this, I went and looked again, and
the "Search in contents" option was right where you would expect it to
be?  I SWEAR it wasn't there when I looked before!

...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

Post a reply to this message