After a few more hours with the Windows 7 Beta, I am seeing that there is more to like, and more to dislike.
I really don’t see why this should be. Some things, that, to my way of thinking, should be a given, are not implemented at all. I am truly trying to like this, but there are just so many things to irk me.
Take the Control Panel, please! (Sorry, had to be done – those old enough to know will appreciate, and those not can ask someone who Henny Youngman was.) The Control Panel is maddening, but as I recall, this is the asinine behavior instituted with Vista. Looking at the segmented view, I immediately thought that mouse settings should be under the heading Hardware. But no! That would make sense, since, after all, the mouse is something that is physical, can be touched, you know, like HARDWARE. (This is the sort of thing that to me seems a place where Microsoft, in all their wisdom, should be making things more logical, not less. aggregation of things intelligently is fine, as long as intelligently is the operative word.)
I use a Microsoft Wireless Intellimouse Explorer with Fingerprint Reader on this machine. It works well with the standard driver, although I must confess that I thought for awhile the right (secondary) mouse button was not working, because things I expected to work that way don’t – this is very disturbing – a change of this type will freak out some, and irritate others. I am in that second group. Also disturbing is the fact that the Intellimouse driver, a beta 7.0 designated just for Windows 7, has the inane message that, after installation is complete, I should install the Fingerprint Reader software. How nice that would be, except that once again, Microsoft has made a bridge to nowhere, as it has dropped support for this item, and there is no way, according to the OS, to install the 32-bit version. Sure, there is probably a hack, but since I have 3 of these things, I am not really excited that there is no support in Vista, much less Windows 7.
(This is digression, but I am acknowledging it, so it is alright!) Why does Microsoft spend all the time and effort to market Fingerprint Readers, touting their speed and safety benefits, and having them included in keyboards and mice they market, then dropping the idea like a hot potato. The company also made no deals for continued support by Digital Persona (the company that designed the original software) so that DP has veered from the path where these devices can be supported with that company’s current software offerings. This is annoying behavior – the kind we expect from a Japanese, Chinese, or Korean company, that can explain it away in a wash of half spoken, badly enunciated reasons why they don’t give a darn about making customers happy – not from a U.S. company, especially Microsoft. (Digression over, back to our regular program.)
This operating system has some nice things about it, however. I don’t like the pastel shading of everything – it reeks of girliness, but the screen metrics, other than the gargantuan size of the icons, is very nice. Once you get things cranked down so that it doesn’t look like you are either 5 years old or visually impaired, or both, things look fairly nice. The Segoe font is very easy on the eyes, and doesn’t make me want to rush back to my favorite – Tahoma.
During my playing with the install this morning, I see that an update from Microsoft has come down, and the ATi video is working a small bit better. Aero has now been activated, and the way to do it was completely non-intuitive – again, non-intuitive is not the word that Microsoft should want anyone to use with their operating system – the system settings changed after I re-ran the Experience Index, which, due to the driver problem only went from 1.0 to 2.4, but that was enough to be able to use Aero. I should also mention that I searched the help for ‘Aero activation’ to find that there was nothing. Bad Microsoft, bad operating system. This is exactly the kind of absolutely abysmal help system that should be augmented by a 500 page paper manual with every license of Windows 7 – or else Microsoft should get it together and get those context-sensitive help writers on the stick, so that something like man pages can be turned out.
Which leads to another point – the file structure. With each iteration of the operating system, Microsoft gets more and more into the Unix-like file hierarchy and structure. Fine, but then why bash those who use Unix, Linux, BSD, etc? Some of these changes are simply stupid, and serve to irk me further – like the Users designator, instead of the Documents and Settings of XP. Not to say the Documents and Settings is gone, it is simply inaccessible, giving a resounding ‘chung’ when one tries to expand it. Bad Microsoft, bad operating system. This change especially seems to be one done for some annoyance factor, and no other. In the parlance of today, ‘What’s up with that?
So hey, ATi don’t you think it is time to get your people moving on at least one set of decent, working drivers?
Microsoft, it seems that, for every thing I like better than XP, there are two more changes that seem as though they were changed just to piss me off ( I am not alone in my feelings). Is this the sort of thing you really want to do. We are not dogs, and you are not Pavlov – get it?
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