OMG ... Win 7 = Such a Piece of S***

To be fair, some of the following rant is based on my experience on one computer. This week I will test some of the problems outlined below on other computers and determine if they are reproducible.

OMG, Windows 7 is such a piece of horse sh*t. I swear the OS is so borked beyond my ability to explain in words.

To start with, both Vista (my sister's laptop) and Windows 7 (my laptop) have horrible problems with wireless networking. We both have the same problem on two different networks (my house Linksys router, her house Netgear). Each time we visit each other's house (bringing our laptops) the other's laptop flat out refuses to work with the wireless network. We are able to connect, but the network has a limited availability icon, and is unable to browse the Internet. The *only* solution I have found to resolve this problem is to reboot the  pc, which is retarded.

Normally I run XP, and runs Vista. She always has had this problem when she bringz her laptop to my house. I tell her rebooting isn't the proper way to fix this problem, but guess what? It's impossible (as far as I can tell) to fix it any other way. It's worth noting that I've never had this problem with XP. While visiting her this weekend (with my Windows 7 laptop in tote) the situation was reversed. I could not connect to her wireless. But once I rebooted the wireless worked fine. Ridiculous!

Today, when I got home, I and tried to connect to my network. Guess what happened? I received the "limited availability" problem once again. I decide to investigate further, and proceed to become completely annoyed to sh*t with Microsoft redesign of everything configuration related.

Allow me to explain this annoyance, breaking it two parts. First, how things used to be (in XP) and then how life is screwed up in Windows 7 (and probably Vista too ... I didn't use it enough to know what has changed between the two).

How XP does it:

Control Panel has a bunch of icons (once you turned off that annoying common tasks view), and each icon either led to a folder (administrative tools, fonts, network connections), or opened an applet. An applet was almost always (unless it was a third party applet or the gayness that was security center) was a dialog with ok and cancel buttons, and optionally property pages and an apply button. -- Simple, direct, nuff said

How Windows 7 does it:

Sometimes you get old style applets, other times you get something which mimics a rich web page like document view  (with bread crumbs), and even other get new windows popups, which mimic web page like documents, and a lot of time sh*t just isn't accessible except through text links in a bar docked to the left. [1. see note at the bottom about icons]

What do I mean by some stuff isn't accessible? I mean Windows 7 bread breadcrumb bar tells me some control panel screen I am in, let's call it Y, is under path X. I click path X to go up one level, then click the chevron next to X hoping to see Y in the drop down list of X's sub items. But us what? X is not there. No that would be too logical, to have Y appear in that list. Scanning the entire screen presented by X I see no way to get back to Y. There is no way to get to Y from X even though Y first appeared as a child of X.

Now I know what you are thinking. Hit back to get to Y. Yes that works, but that's not the point. The point is how do I get to Y ever again? To that you might say same way you got to it in the first place. And how did I get to Y in the first place? Well through a link on a Microsoft property page in a Dialog launched from button attached to another web type applet which was launched from a popup list in the system tray of course!

Summary: WTF Microsoft?

And then is a weird behavior with those text labels in the web mimic's applets. This I need to verify, because it is totally borked and I have to believe it was just a weird glitch, but I'll mention it because maybe someone else has experienced this behavior.

The behavior: Sometimes clicking the text links on the left side of type web type control panel applets leads to the wrong place. What do I mean? I mean the text says one thing, clicking it goes somewhere entirely wrong. For example I clicked manage wireless networks and it brings my to the power settings applet. This has happened a few times, and I was able to reproduce it, but it doesn't happen every time. Needs further confirmation.

So then, I reboot my laptop only find my wireless Internet runs dog slow. I change some of my router settings (make it G only) and retry my laptop connection speed. Now for whatever reason I can't get to websites, but can ping google.com and microsoft.com. I add and remove my wireless (where did the repair option go? WTF). I get a limited availability icon again. I think, "Okay let’s have take up Microsoft's little offer to diagnose the problem." The diagnosis takes about 2 minutes and tells me how to solve my problem by describing what an ethernet cable looks like and recommending that I plug that cable into my PC. Great work there Microsoft! Plugging an ethernet cable into my computer to fix my wireless connection, why didn't I think of that? /sarcasm

I could go on for a few pages, but you get the idea. I'm not happy with Windows 7.

Notes:

1. Icons

Who the f*ck at Microsoft decided icons were bad and should be removed where ever possible? What do I mean by removed? The start menu icons for computer, control panel, documents are gone. They are just text in Windows 7. Explorer removed to ability to add or remove icons from the toolbar, and the any toolbar buttons are now just text. Gone are the up, copy, cut, paste, properties, full screen and more icons. In the control panel, the links on the "always visible left panel" are text only, not icons.

I prefer to look at icons glyphs with a distinctive (cartoonish) silhouette that tells me at a glance what something does without having to read. And so does everyone else. This is why our road signs are red octagons, red triangles, yellow diamonds, and yellow pentagons. Because when people are busy and want to keep their minds on a task (like not running someone over, or trying to get some work done), we don't want to stop to read a bunch of words for a common notification we might expect at time X (where X is when your are approaching a four way intersection).

I don't want a big wordy dialog taking up my entire field of view when copying a file (ahem, do you want to copy and overwrite this file, or copy and backup the old file, or do not copy at all? oh and btw, for how many conflicts would you like to handle with you answer? this one or the next 563? barf!)

I'd also like to write about two or three paragraphs about the Microsoft’s craptastic "realistic" icons ... but I won’t.