Windoze

101 STUPID THINGS ABOUT MICROSOFT WINDOWS 95 AND 98
and the programs that run on them.

© Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000 Bill Van Dyk, all rights reserved.	I'm just getting started on this one so I don't have 101 yet… but believe me, it's just a matter of finding the time to write them down. If you have any more gems you'd like to contribute, e-mail me.
	Does anybody in their right minds store documents in the Windows directory? No? Then why does Microsoft Word, and most other Microsoft programs, automatically default to that directory every time you try to open a file? Yes, I know you can change it-- it's still stupid.
	If you convert a html document to Word and try to edit a linked phrase by moving the cursor to it, those idiots programmed Word to load the file you clicked on. Try to delete a letter: the whole phrase is deleted. Try to go back to the original document-- it's not listed as an open file. Try to load the file: it asks if you want to "revert" to the stored version. So here we have about five idiocies in a row.
	Quite frequently, if you try to remove a card, that Windows has been incapable of installing correctly, by deleting it from the Device Manager, Windows will demand that you find a driver for the card and install it…. and then kindly delete the card from the system. (By the way, if you reinstall the card later… it will ask for the nice drivers again!)
	New Pentiums are about 100 times as powerful as the first IBM 8088's. Hard disks are 100 times as capacious. Most computers now have about 20 or 30 times as much RAM. So how come it takes longer to load a file into Word or Excel today than it did five years ago? Why does it take so long to load? Oh, I know-- because they are giving you so many features! What if you don't want all those wonderful features -- like on the fly grammar harassment-- but you would prefer some speed for a change? Forget it.
	When you load a file from drive A:, edit it, save it, then remove the disk, Windows insists on writing something to Drive A:. Look, I'm done with the file, I saved it, you know I saved it, so what exactly are you doing on drive A:? What secret things are you storing on the disk?
	You might think problem #5 could be avoided if you "close" the file first. Dream on.
	If there is no disk in Drive A:, the almighty, incredibly ingenious, brilliantly designed computer… keeps trying and trying again. LOOK, STUPID, THERE'S NO DISK IN THERE!
	Everything else comes to a halt, so Microsoft can check three or four more times just in case that disk jumped out of your pocket and threw itself back into the disk drive.
	You install a new device by going to Control Panel, install new hardware, add the hardware, add the driver, and reboot. It reboots and says "I found a new device! Wow! I think I'll install it." Then-- I'm not making this up-- it will often ask for the drivers again. (This happened many times to me, most recently with a second parallel printer port). The drivers are already on the system! It doesn't check, doesn't know they are there, and doesn't care.
	Does Windows erase the drivers for cards that you have removed? If only! But it doesn't. You can prove this by looking up the names of the drivers and searching for them in the Windows directories. So why, if you install that card later, does Windows demand drivers from the install disk again? Why not just check the directory?
	If you save a word file with an .htm extension, Word thinks you might also want to have a .doc extension, so your document reads: w101.htm.doc. Smart.
	If you add a new user or change most parameters in Novell, you don't have to reboot all the time to have them take effect. Novell has been like this for about 50 years (all right, 10). Is this so hard to do? Is a company that makes $50,000,000,000 a year unable to afford to hire a few competent programmers?
	Would it have been so difficult to make file manager support long file names? Why does dir at the DOS prompt show the stupid abbreviations only? Why do Microsoft Programs install themselves into directories like "microso~1" instead of "Winword" or "Access"?
	Why does Word say it is "converting" a html document it saved as an html document, and then load it as an html document (ie. no tabs) anyway?
	Microsoft Front Page: I have never told it to get my web page from the web. I only work off my local drive C: and then upload the files with FTP. Yet, every time I try to edit index.html, there it goes again trying to retrieve images from http://whatever, locking up my system and crashing everything else.
	Right at this moment, Windoze is showing me a hourglass. I am still working. This would be good it it was supposed to do that, but wild and unpredictable behaviour is not an asset.
	Right at this moment, Windoze is showing me a hourglass. I am still working. This would be good it it was supposed to do that, but wild and unpredictable behaviour is not an asset.
	Does Win95 use the autoexec.bat and config.sys files? Yes/No? Maybe? Sometimes? Why can't a corporation the size of Microsoft hire the equivalent of a "continuity" editor to handle these dilemmas?
	Front Page saves my home page index in one format. When I get home and reload it on a different machine running a slightly earlier version of Front Page, it suddenly blows up some of my tables to 20 times the size it was. Thank you Microsoft.
	Front Page will change the column widths arbitrarily. There doesn't appear to be an option to fix it. I have to go into good old QEDIT and manually replace the errant instructions.
	Norton Utilities keeps stopping from important maintenance tasks because something has written to the disk. Can we not get organized here? This could be Norton's fault. More likely both Microsoft and Norton are responsible.
	MS Office-- and many other software programs-- keep installing themselves into different locations. First it's c:\msoffice. Then it's c:\program files\msoffice... Templates go missing. If you tell it to install in c:\apps , as many smart people should do, it still creates a damn c:\program files directory to store some kind of link files. I don't want the stupid c:\program files directory because it's a nuisance because the Win 95 dos prompt doesn't let you type CD C:\PROGRAM FILES. You have to type CD C:\PROGRA~1. Why? Don't ask me. And don't ask me why Front Page just made the C:\progra~1 a hot link.
	The Wizards in Access are smart enough to build a data base application (ha ha) but not smart enough conclude that most users don't want every other page printed blank. Why on earth would it do that? What is so hard about an algorithm that says: "is the page blank? If no, print it, if yes, skip it". I'm a lousy Clipper programmer but even I can do it.
	If you use the sound card in a normal Windows session, to play a wave file, for example, you can't run Cakewalk (a midi program that uses the sound card) unless you reboot. Could be Cakewalk's fault. Might even be Sound Blaster's fault. But experience suggests Windows is responsible.
	Win 95 might tell you that you have two video drivers loaded and that one of them doesn't work, but won't show you the incorrect driver when you try to remove it from Control Panel/System/Device Manager.
	Windows NT can be cracked. Read the the November 1997 issue of Byte magazine for details.
	If you click on a IPX driver for dial-up connections and remove it, Windows might remove the ipx network driver as well. But that's okay: just click on CANCEL. Oops-- cancel doesn't cancel. The drivers are gone. Reboot, however, and they might still be there, with a couple of incomprehensible error messages.
	In the middle of this process, Windows brought up a window asking for a disk and drivers again (even though I was REMOVING the drivers). That's not a new error. The new error is that it locked up and it took several ctrl-alt-del's to close it.
	When building a report, Access shows you a lovely header with gray scale… but doesn't print it. My printer, a Laser Jet IV, is perfectly capable of the graphics, so what's the problem?
	I just spent five minutes separating the blank sheets from the printed sheets in my ACCESS report. Surprisingly, ACCESS still counted the number of pages correctly. Is this another error, or just an example of part of the program not knowing what the other part is doing? Five minutes may seem like no big deal-- but add it to the hundreds of other little irritants, slow-downs, thrashings, etc., and you may be spending half of your day trying to fix problems instead of doing productive work.
	I don't like wasting paper. I don't like ACCESS printing double-spaced when I didn't tell it to. But that's nothing compared to the simple problem of changing it. You can call up buttons for ACTIVE X and THREED Controls and Audio and all kinds of completely, absurdly, irrelevant functions, but try to find the instructions for single-spacing the report. I'll let you know if I ever find it.
	Mar 3, 1998: After boosting the RAM in my computer to 64 MB, deleting everything on the hard disk and reinstalling Windows clean, it still locks up and crashes, most often without explanation.
	Microsoft's "Active X", meant to compete with JAVA, actually installs modules on your system. Just what we want from an application intended to run on your internet browser, right? Think about this: you inadvertantly access a malevolent hacker, and Internet Explorer happily gives him permission to install shared modules on your home computer?
	Word Perfect 4.1 allowed you to navigate directories and glance at the first paragraphs of files before deciding if you wanted to load the whole thing. Word still can't do that.
March 4, 1998	When I try to enter a date macro in Microsoft Word, it errors out. Why? What did I do? I just installed it straight out of the box? No explanation, no remedy!
	A new install of Microsoft Office overwrites your word macros and templates from the previous version. Is there some way around this? Yes, you copy your templates into a back up directory before doing the install. This is unnecessarily complex-- by what absurd reasoning does Microsoft assume you won't want to keep your templates or macros?
	Windows NT, the more "robust" version of Win 95, actually locks up fairly frequently for a "mission critical" OS. If you really want a multi-user system, make sure you order about 100 Gigabytes of RAM (while Novell purrs on 100 MB).
	After locking up for the umpteenth time, Windows asks if I would like to install the modem which has been in my computer and functioning propertly for six months.
	Bkupexec, a program from Seagate, flounders aimlessly for about 20 seconds before showing a menu.
	I installed Encarta. No problems were reported. I ran it. It performed an illegal operation and died.
	I removed my drive A: and replaced it with a 120 MB Superdisk. Now Windows reports that I have a 5.25" floppy as drive A: It tries to search it whenever I look for a file.
	Why would any sane person keep all of his files in a directory called "My Documents"? Sounds like some kind of grade school portfolio: this is where I keep MY documents, as opposed to the 500 MB of crap that Windows loads onto the system.
Dec 98	Installing Outlook on an employee's notebook computer resulted in a sequence of crashes, lost data, corrupted files, corrupted everything, complete re-install of Windows... and Netscape.
March 99	Try installing a plug & play modem on a Pentium 350 with Windows 98. Good luck. Three technicians and I spent a total of about 12 hours trying to get a GVC plug-n-play 56K modem working correctly. We think it's finally fixed.
	Installing ACT 4.0 (Symantec) gave me an error message: "Cannot open the C:\windows\temp\_istmp0.dir\readme.txt file. Make sure there is a disk in the drive you specified."
	Installing a PCMCIA card into a Compaq Presario 1920 laptop, Windows finds the driver on the disk in drive A:, then asks for a file on the Windows 98 CDROM in the C:\windows\cabs\options directory, where the file, apparently, is not. I tried typing in A:. That worked. ???
	Why, in heaven's name, does Windows persist in asking you for a password to log in to "Microsoft Networking"?? 1. there is no network. 2. the password protects nothing. All you have to do is press "ESC" and you have full access to every file on the computer. 3. I didn't ask for a password screen. Windows says "if you do not enter a password, this screen will not appear again". Liar. It appears every time.
	On that same Pentium II 300, Windows 98 is slow as molasses. It is an outrage. It is an example of the utter contempt with which Microsoft holds consumers: here's our new product. It's bigger. It's sloppier. It doesn't work properly. And it's way slower. And you get on your new computer whether your want it or not.
	Why on earth does Scandisk take two weeks to scan a 4 GIG hard drive? Why does Defrag not work at all-- it keeps reporting that some other program has written to the disk and therefore it must start over, even when no other programs are running.
April 20, 1999	On a brand new Compaq laptop, Word freezes, locks up tighter than a drum.
	Installing Windows 98-- half way through the printer install, which it insists you MUST do, it loses the CD drive letter. Does this consistently.
May 8, 1999	Norton Anti Virus causes my computer to shut down immediately after booting. Right now, I have to boot into "step" mode to get it running. When I have six hours, I'll try to remove Norton to see if that helps.
May 20, 1999	Installing Netscape 4.6 cost me all my newsgroups. There is some insane procedure for reconnecting to them that I am starting to figure out.
May 22, 1999	Microsoft's Front Page installs the Front Page Explorer as an icon without letting you just use Front Page Editor unless you go find the file itself and attach it using Taskbar settings. This wouldn't be all that bad except that Front Page Editor has never worked with my ISP even though my ISP insists they use it all the time and the extensions are there.
	A growing cause of insanity: try upgrading your computer. Do you realize that you can't copy your system or programs or applications over to your new system? They all have to be installed or configured. Templates have to be tracked down and matched up. You could try putting your old hard drive on your new system--- great idea! Then you have a 420 MB drive on a Pentium 350! Well, okay-- make it drive "D" and keep your new 8 GIG drive as C:. But then, how do you run your programs? You can just add icons--- they have to be installed.... But if you reinstall, do you know where all your laboriously created templates and configurations are? Good luck.
May 25, 1999	Does Quicken assume you will never, ever reinstall the program? That you will never change computers or hard drives? After reinstalling it onto my new Pentium, it keeps popping up asking me to register the three year old program.
June 2, 1999	You want to work on a file on your notebook computer. So you copy it from your desktop to a disk, and then onto the hard drive on your notebook. You finish your work and want to copy it back. But when you tell Windows to copy it to the floppy, it says there isn't enough room. There is plenty of room-- all you have to do is delete the old copy first, then put the new copy on the disk. Windows has already asked me to confirm that, yes, indeed, I do want to overwrite the old file.
	In Microsoft's latest ads for NT, they trumpet the fact that NT is three times as reliable as Windows 98. ????! What kind of idiots are these people? Operating system software is not a food-- the more you pay, the better it tastes. Operating system software is a tool, and Microsoft is publicly admitting that it doesn't work. What if Ford told you that their Escort was three times as likely to break down as their Lincoln Continental? Would you find that acceptable? Would any one ever buy an Escort again? No. Ford tries to make all of their cars reliable because otherwise people will go out and buy Japanese cars. You buy a Lincoln for the stupid leather interior-- not for reliability. When will Microsoft learn the same lesson? The day they have real competition again.
August 10, 1999	During installation, Windows 98 asks if you wish to make a startup disk. Well... it doesn't really ask. It just starts the process. If you click "cancel", it stops it, but then tells you to remove your new startup disk from drive A:. With all their money and programmers, couldn't they have fixed a simple error like that?
August 11, 1999	While installing a network card, using drivers provided on the 3.5" floppy, Windows reported that it couldn't find "rtsnd.dll". Please insert the Windows 98 disk. It was inserted. It couldn't find the file it said was on it's own install disk. I pressed "cancel". It reported that the ethernet card could not be installed. I clicked on "reinstall driver". It reported the driver was installed. When it rebooted, it reported several Microsoft network files missing. It asked for them from the Windows 98 CD which it suddenly thought was located at A:\win98!! I didn't want the damn Microsoft network in the first place!
	When typing the above entry, Front Page decided that A:\win98 should be a hotlink. To what? Idiots.
September 1999	Quicken asks you, at start up, if you want to make Quicken the default program for web connect services. A little box at the left supposedly lets you tell it not to show it's ugly face ever again. It's no use. Checked or unchecked, Quicken keeps haranguing you. Buzz off!
	HP's scanner drivers will actually assassinate the default Windows 98 drivers (which work, though at lower resolution) while installing their defective selves. Think you'll ever get your scanner working again? Not unless you fork over $40 for HP to send you the disk ($16.95 + tax + $19 for the mythical "shipping and handling" -- read ridiculous surcharge). They won't offer the correct drivers for download off the internet. Even Microsoft does that.
	Quicken automatically fills in new checks for you. Type in the vendor's name and it fills in the amount, category, and whether or not the check has been cleared!!! Would it have taken too much for Curly, Larry, and Moe to realize that checks are never instantly cleared?
	Windows tells you that you can click an option to save your password for dial-up networking. It doesn't. I used to be able to trick it into saving it, but I forgot how I did it.
January 2000	Netscape asks for a password when you want to check your mail. But if you press "ESC", you can go right in and read anyone's stored messages.
	Office 2000 introduces yet another file format conundrum. The obvious intention is to annoy people who haven't upgraded by making new files unreadable in previous versions.
	When you uninstall Delphi 4 (because it keeps asking for a password to access data when I never gave it a password), the uninstaller tells you that a certain file is no longer needed. Delete? Sure. Then it warns that the file might be used by other applications. Are you sure you want to delete?
February 2000	I tried to uninstall Delphi 3.0. Windoze tells me that a file, graph32.ocx, is no longer used by any programs. Then it says, if any programs still need this program, removing it will cause them to crash. Do you still want to remove it? Hmmm. No, but why are you asking? Following that, it listed about 50 other files of which it also had no opinion. What, pray tell then, is the purpose of "Uninstall" ? Why all this crap about Windows-compliant programs if compliance doesn't mean anything? I was warned by Delphi 5.0 that if I didn't properly uninstall previous versions, my new version might crash.
	After installing Office 2000, I clicked on Outlook. It started running threatening to take over all my email and internet functions. I said, no thank you and cancelled out. Windoze immediately popped up with a message "cannot run Outlook". I know, you idiot.
	Here's a doozy! Office 97 allows you to select a number of directories as your "favorites", for storing and retrieving files. Since I have thousands of files on my hard drive, this little feature is almost indispensable. Without it, I have to click and poke all over the place just to load files that I frequently work on. Well, after running Microsoft's Internet Explorer a few times, I went back into Word 97 and found that my "favorites" now consisted of a list of web sites--- the bookmarks I used to keep track of web sites I like to visit. What kind of a complete moron would create this function??? Do they think I'm going to store all my files on the internet from now on?