Ben Goodger on Fighting With Windows (Foo #1!!!)
The great Ben Goodger has run a series of short posts recently about his fight with his development laptop, and the Windows installation on it.
I found these articles particularly relevant, as I've spent these last days rebuilding the Windows install on my machine here at work.
As I see it there are a few issues at play here.
First of all, an OS should most certainly not simply degrade to (as Ben says) "useless"-ness after time. Any amount of time, really. Maybe it needs repairing sometimes, maybe that's even often if you're a heavy user - but this attitude of rebuilding the machine everytime the OS gets too foobar-ed to continue serving usefully has got to go. (For the record, OS X has a ways to go in this regard as well, but it's certainly better than XP)
The Windows XP installer is the biggest piece of crap I have ever used. It looks terrible (640x480 display with 256 color graphics, monospaced fonts), it behaves badly (it does things that take hours to complete with nothing but a small green progress bar to tell you what's going on, and it reboots without telling you it's going to do it or why MULTIPLE TIMES), it makes you feel stupid by expecting you to know what's going on and what options you want to choose, and it doesn't give you the functionality you need in an OS installer (disk partitioning, reformatting, etc).
Actually it does let you do some of that stuff, and even lets you do some nifty 'repair' things too, but it does it in a 'curses' interface that looks even worse and it even harder to use than the XP installer described above.
I could go on forever about my own problems and the shortcomings I see in the hardware and software I use from day to day, but Ben does a good job with his gripes too, so go check him out.
I found these articles particularly relevant, as I've spent these last days rebuilding the Windows install on my machine here at work.
As I see it there are a few issues at play here.
- Removing software from Windows SUCKS.
- Installing Windows SUCKS.
- Companies are building hardware that SUCKS.
First of all, an OS should most certainly not simply degrade to (as Ben says) "useless"-ness after time. Any amount of time, really. Maybe it needs repairing sometimes, maybe that's even often if you're a heavy user - but this attitude of rebuilding the machine everytime the OS gets too foobar-ed to continue serving usefully has got to go. (For the record, OS X has a ways to go in this regard as well, but it's certainly better than XP)
The Windows XP installer is the biggest piece of crap I have ever used. It looks terrible (640x480 display with 256 color graphics, monospaced fonts), it behaves badly (it does things that take hours to complete with nothing but a small green progress bar to tell you what's going on, and it reboots without telling you it's going to do it or why MULTIPLE TIMES), it makes you feel stupid by expecting you to know what's going on and what options you want to choose, and it doesn't give you the functionality you need in an OS installer (disk partitioning, reformatting, etc).
Actually it does let you do some of that stuff, and even lets you do some nifty 'repair' things too, but it does it in a 'curses' interface that looks even worse and it even harder to use than the XP installer described above.
I could go on forever about my own problems and the shortcomings I see in the hardware and software I use from day to day, but Ben does a good job with his gripes too, so go check him out.
posted by JD @ 10:04 a.m.
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