August 18th, 2009

My top three Windows 7 annoyances ... and some fixes!

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 3:48 am

Categories: Windows 7

Tags: Annoyance, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

Annoyance #2: Poor tray notification management

The system tray is a dumping ground that software vendors use to give their applications eye time (so when it comes time to upgrade, it doesn’t come as a surprise to you to find that you had a particular bit of software installed!). Anything and everything wants to be in on your system tray, and it can quickly become stuffed with icons.

Microsoft’s solution to this growing problem is hide icons. Sorry, but this solution feels like running away from the problem to me. In fact, hiding icons make the problem worse because users can end up with dozens of applications all sucking up system resources, but these apps are all hidden away.

Under Vista we had an easy and safe way to control using the System Explorer feature of Windows Defender. Under Windows 7 System Explorer is gone. You now either have to uninstall the application, or, play with MSConfig. Don’t, under any circumstances, go digging through the system registry! Gaaaaahhhhh!

Annoyance #3: Too many editions!!!!

I’m going to keep on coming back to this old chestnut. In an ideal world there’s be two versions of Windows 7 - Home and Professional (with maybe a cheap netbook edition too). However, in the interests of trying to get users to “upgrade” to new editions in order to unlock features of dubious function, Microsoft has introduced a whole raft of editions. I’ve stopped trying to get my head this mess and leave it to others to decipher it all.

While I appreciate that there’s money in offering edition upgrades, and that the Anytime Upgrade mechanism is a quick, easy and painless way to upgrade (and take user’s money!), the whole thing feels horribly messy. It’s the complete antithesis of Apple’s “one size fits them all” OS. If one of the weaknesses of Linux is the fact that there are too many distros, then Microsoft is positioning itself over the same hole. Choice is good, but too much choice can easily result in analysis-paralysis. Given XP’s current dominant market share over Vista, anything getting in the way of XP users upgrading could be a big problem.

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