Tag Archives: windows

Reasons I dislike using Microsoft Windows

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In no particular order, I give you my Windows and Microsoft annoyances. Trying not to favour another OS, and yes, I still use Windows.

File/Folder layout

Yup, this is a killer. Windows over the time has been built up of hack ontop of hack, and it’s file structure has changed several times, but with every change the older folders have been left for legacy applications. In OS X, GNU/Linux and BSD operating systems file locations are some what sensible. /etc for config files, /lib for libraries, /home for homes, /bin for binaries. It’s all placed in logical places.

Application Support files / Install

Windows has no single way to install and setup applications. Installers are not standardised and usually make a mess of the system. There is no one location for start up applications and every time you want to install or remove an application you must use a software vendors application, trusting them to clean up their mess.

Support files for applications are scattered throughout the system and it makes backing up a programs setting is fairly hard. It is slowly improving with Local Settings and Application Data, but still fair from perfect.

Standards

Microsoft can’t even follow their own standards, so how are developers meant to. Microsoft event’s a new standard for each problem they run into, and don’t even bother to look at existing standards to improve on.

EEE

Which brings me to my next point. The good old EEE – Embrace extend and extinguish. The wiki page explains it quite well, and even provides examples :>

DIrectX
Well fuck you DirectX.

Shell / Command Line

Oh dear god. The current standard shell is absolutely use, and has barely improved since DOS 6. Oh well, at least we have tab completion now. YAY! The good news is PowerShell is looking pretty cool. Shame PowerShell isn’t supported on Windows 2000.

Dodgy Virus Protection

Windows has protected once again. To slow down virus they have limited our connections and removed our telnet. It hasn’t stopped viruses, although it has annoyed the hell out of us.

Requirement to have a virii scanner

An operating system that suggests you run a virus scanner is flawed. All that should be required is security updates every several days, not a whole new product by a third party.

5000 versions of the same product (ultimate ect…)

Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Business Premium, Ultimate. This makes maintaing computers an absolute bitch, and just silly. Provide one operating system for all computers. Eg OS X :P .

NTFS not being an open standard

This really isn’t a Windows annoyance, but an announce if you aren’t using Windows. NTFS standard needs to be open so other operating systems can read it.

Updates

Windows is excellent at updating every 3 hours, not to mention updating even when automatic updates has been turned off. This is quite annoying for me, and people that just want to turn off their computers. Instead they have to wait an hour just install a simple update.

Warning Messages

If you ever download an application on Windows Vista or 7, you’ll have just under 8 warning messages to click allow to, and due to this, all users become quite jaded towards the messages, and completely ignore them.

Unrelated Note

On an unrelated note, I would like to see Windows have a unified way to saving application data, and sandbox each applications. When applications want to use other applications data files the OS throws up a warning message asking if the program can have control over those files.

Windows 7 Build 7127

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Acer One con Windows 7 RC1
Taller Hikari – Acer One con Windows 7 RC1

I’ve been playing around with the new build for a little bit now, and I can say that it runs much more smoother than build 7000. Infact, I find Windows 7 nice and easy to use, and seems a little bit more shiny than OS X. Moving around the file system is still a pain in the ass, and a few panels are still colored the nice old grey from XP. The search features are great. Nearly as fast as spotlight, however when you search for a program it doesn’t automatically highlight the program, which would save some keystrokes or mouse clicks. I wish that programs would act more like OS X, in the sense that you can close all the Windows, but the program will still stay running and remain in the dock (read: taskbar). They are still using that dreaded Program Files folder, and between the registry and the local settings folder, the backend is still a mess. The UAC doesn’t bug you as much as Vista, yet I still don’t think Microsoft has fully understood the purpose of it, unlike the OS X version.

It’s a shame that Windows has tried to make all programs backward compatible for so long. The amount of hacks required to achieve this, yet remain secure is huge.

Windows 7 iscsi

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windows 7 Build 7057 (RC1) en mi Acer Aspire One
Taller Hikari – windows 7 Build 7057 (RC1) en mi Acer Aspire One

I haven’t really looked into iscsi much as it looked slow, and some what useless unless you have lots of servers. While I was playing around with making my own iMac, Hamzah suggested I use gPXE to network boot my iMac. Today I started to play with gPXE and chainloading it on top of PXE worked really well. While digging around in documentation Hamzah, and I took interest in booting Windows using gPXE and iscsi or ATA over ethernet. We both decided to go ahead with iscsi, and by following http://www.etherboot.org/wiki/sanboot/win7.

A few things caught me out, which slowed me down. The first one was iscsi, make sure this is setup correctly. You don’t get any warnings that iscsi is working or not using gPXE and Windows. Make sure you actually point it to a block device and not to a file like I tried to do :P . Simplest method is to create a LVM volume. My ietd.conf looked like this.

Target iqn.2009-02.net.internaluse.salad:iscsiboot
         Lun 0 Path=/dev/data/iscsi,Type=fileio

The other problem I ran into was chainloading gPXE on PXE, once gPXE loads from PXE your BIOS or gPXE will no longer look for a DVD or CD drive making it impossible to install Windows 7. Find an old network card and flash the ROM in that. After that it was fairly easy to install, everything just worked.

I was quite amazed at the speed of the Windows 7 considering it was running of 100mbit iscsi.

nLite

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I re-installed Windows XP on my Macbook yesterday, but I done two things different. The first thing I done different was using XP Pro, rather than home, which makes little difference to me, but it does give me the chance to use other weird and wonderful features I don’t typically use.

The second thing I done different was by using nLite. nLite allows you to customize your Windows XP install, by adding and removing certain settings and combining service packs. For example I used nLite to combine SP3, remove IE, WMP, messenger, other random stuff, drivers I don’t use, services I don’t want on, set the default theme to classic, disable hibernation, disable system restore, disable automatic updates, set the systems location and time zone, and slipstreamed the serial into the main install. It also patched the install to allow custom themes and the TCP hack for torrenting.

It was surprisingly easy to do and setup, which was good and I’ll use this disc for a long time. M*A*S*H is on now so have to go :P .

GMod On OS X (2.16 MacBook with Intel 945GM)

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I bought GMod the other day and enjoyed it while in Windows Vista (Boot Camp) however it was a bit sluggish. I know from experience that source games tend to run nicer inside Crossover than actually in Windows, go figure. First off you’ll need to install crossover, and steam inside crossover, there are plenty of tutorials on how to do this. Next you’ll need to complete the font hack so you can see the text. In crossover go Programs, Run Command, select the correct bottle, and type in regedit. Inside regedit navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER – Software – Wine – AppDefaults – hl2.exe – Direct3D and double click on tf2_alpha_hack and replace it with “-game tf2; -game ep2; -game portal; -game garrysmod”. Now in steam you’ll have to right click on Gmod and click properties and change the launch parameters to “-console -heapsize 512000 -dxlevel 70 -novid +cl_drawmonitors 0 +r_shadowrendertotexture 00″. If your game launches and you can only see a quater of the window, just change the video settings, they just fit in.

Excel and Numbers.app killer problem for students

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I have this problem constantly when using spreadsheeting programs for school work and research. Programers can easily add this feature that will save everyone a little bit of time. Let’s start off with a simple scenario, you’ve just conducted some sort of experiment where you have tested Voltage vs Resistance or something simple. You end up with some data looking like this.

300 OHMS = 10.4 V
600 OHMS = 9.2 V
900 OHMS = 8.1 V
1000 OHMS = 7.2 V
1500 OHMS = 4.6 V
Now we go to graph this, so OHMS are on the x axis and y is the voltage.
Numbers and Excel have the same problem, they won’t let you have the x axis constant. Instead the physical gap between 1000 and 1500 is the same as the gap between 900 and 1000, and 900 and 600, all of which are different logically. Kinda stupid right ?

Good old Windows 3.11

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I setup windows 3.11 yesterday inside qemu on dos 6.22 . I enabled the vnc option so you’s can see what computing used to be like before 95, 98, ME, 2000 and XP . Just goto DEAD LINK for a look, it won’t connect if someelse is using the machine at the same time.  If you have vnc you can use fruit.theskorm.net:2 rather tthan the crummy java one. Anyway here’s a screenie.