Outside of a few graphic design classes, I’ve never really used an Apple OS. From what I understand, it makes things very, very simple. I imagine the “goal” people at Microsoft had in mind when they set out to make certain “enhanced usability” tools for their operating systems was to match the Apple OS usability. “People say our OS sucks compared to Apple’s,” the Microsoft execs would say, “you, guy who has been working on windows his entire life and never taken a software usability course, fix it!” What we ended up getting were things that touted themselves as usable and helpful, but that didn’t quite work, and were *so* usable that you couldn’t turn them off if you wanted to.

In Vista this means that when I was searching my music folder for something I ended up getting 0 results for something I knew I owned. I clicked advanced search and saw that by default I wasn’t searching anything that wasn’t indexed. Indexing was a system hog in XP so I had turned it off in Vista. “Ok,” I told myself, “I give, I’ll try turning on indexing.” And so I tried. But when I try to turn it on I just get an error for every single file that it’s trying to index, stating “access denied.” When I hit “cancel,” Windows then hilariously thinks indexing is turned on.

So far the one thing Vista has done that has impressed me is make it so then I hit F2 to rename a file, it doesn’t include the extension by default. That’s it. That’s the only thing.

Really interesting lecture by some guy named Randy Pausch. Includes a “world destruction” sequence reminiscent of Don Hertzfeldt’s “Rejected,” as well as a random guy who kind of looks like “the Dude,” but with louder clothing. Oh, and a lot of wisdom as well :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo&eurl=http://www.dipity.com/user/tatercakes/timeline/Internet_Memes/embed_tl?fs=1#

Give it a watch if you’ve the time and inkling.

I’ve been a PC user from the get go: from my first p100 to my two celeron systems, to my amd, to my latest intel dual core. I’ve always had “minor” issues with windows operating systems. The most egregious of which was turning my “media” folder into an OS-defined “media” folder and thus disabling my ability to sort by “last modified” and then re-defaulting these folders to their “media folder” settings despite my attempts to reset them to regular folders (finally resulting in me having to overwrite the registry “folder sniffer” settings).

Recently I installed vista and it has destroyed me. I am often unable to make basic changes because Vista is trying to “protect” me. I’ve done all I can to get rid of these silly protections, but that just makes Vista even more upset with me. Recently I lost all my Office shortcuts in my start menu (the shortcuts exist, they just don’t point to anything). Trying to repair, uninstall, or reinstall office is, without fail, returning an error. Trying to diagnose office tells me I can’t diagnose without the event log running. Trying to run the event log tells me “the instance name passed was not recognized as valid by a wmi data provider,” which means nothing to me.

You’ve finally done it, Vista. You’ve finally killed me. I’m trying drastic solutions now in an attempt to do the most basic of tasks, and it’s exactly as retarded as those Mac commercials make it seem.