slaingod

I recently had to downgrade from x64 to x86 on Vista, to deal with a number of problems, like my scanner not working, Eclipse issues, and just general pain in the ass stuff that always made it just a little more difficult than it needed to be. So I’m giving up 800MB of RAM for my scanner, which I have to hack the drivers for anyway since shamefully HP doesn’t provide drivers for older hardware. Scanner tech simply does not change that much from year to year, and building drivers shouldn’t be that hard if they are competent at all. Spending another 400$ when the Automatic Document Feed scanner I have still works fine is a retarded ‘solution’. Anyway, I am still being annoyed by Vista x86.

So this is my own version of ‘Vista Annoyances’ only without the solutions generally:

• Vista tries to reconnect network drives before the network is connected, which is retarded. It dutifully points out that it can’t reconnect all network drives. And rather than simply connect when it does find the network, I am forced to open up Windows Explorer and click on the disconnected drive to have it reconnect.
• Sleep simply doesn’t work. Oh, it puts my system to sleep alright. Just nothing I do will turn it back on once it is in sleep mode. This probably corrupted my Search Index when I had to hard reboot my system, so I was getting ‘Search Indexer’ had to close error messages every minute or so. Lovely.
• Windows’ continued inability to deal with network folders in Windows Explorer. How many billions of times do their users have to sit there wondering why there folder tree won’t expand while a green bar goes across the top of the screen. Reboot seems to be the only option here… See reconnect bitching.
• UAC: User Access Control. Does it really need to pop up two dialog boxes? One to ask me if I want to acces, the other to actually access? Is there really no way to combine those into a single dialog? Seriously? I know the general mantra is to just disable UAC, but I run pretty fast and loose on my system, with minimal reliance on AntiVirus software, and maximal reliance on questionable software, so I figure a little insurance may be worth the pain. But damn…
• Years and years later, and the Taskbar still cannot do what I tell it to. It won’t remember that I like 2 rows of programs. It won’t rememebr that I use Autohide. It won’t show the Taskbar half the times when I move my mouse to the bottom, I have to prress the Windows button to get it to show. Why in god’s name must the Quick Launch toolbar resize handles make me guess if my icons are going to all be visible when I lock the task bar, or if a few will be in a side menu.
• Dear god enough with the Windows System Tray Notification Area (say that 5 times fast) popup notices! Nothing more annoying than when those things popup and simply don’t go away. Or take FOREVER.
• Just because I like a lot of ‘recent programs’ to show up in my Start menu, why does the stuff on the right side of the start menu also have to move all the way to the top? Wouldn’t it be better to stay closer to the Start button if possible?

More soon…