Forums | MacLife

As for the CTRL+ALT+DELETE / Task Manager in Windoze, I don't even bother with the "Quit Application" screen within the TM. I go straight to "Processes" instead and kill "WINWORD.exe" or "OUTLOOK.exe" (two of the biggest offenders, IMHO) instead.

That way, there's no 8-9 "This Program is Not Responding" windows that pop up because I'm impatient when nothing happens. Just kill the process, and you're good to go. Except if it's "explorer.exe" that gets stuck. Then it's best to just...well, buy a Mac.

That was amazing.

4. Notifications
"Hey, you've just installed a program! A network cable is missing! You've got icons on your desktop you're not using! Windows is constantly alerting us to stuff it thinks we should know, usually by means of word balloons that pop up from the System Tray. (Which, incidentally, is more accurately called the TaskBar Notification Area.) An amazing percentage of these messages are painfully obvious, irrelevant, or just plain inaccurate. Never have so many computer users been distracted from their work by interruptions so useless."


Painfully obvious is right on. I can't believe their isn't a master switch somewhere that can turn this stuff off completely. I'd rather do that and suffer the consequences of not being informed than constantly be distracted by pop-up balloons.

Last edited by adamjg (2007-07-15 1:46 pm)

"Balloons like that can be useful when giving information that is critical. But not stupid"

Moreover, I can't figure a way to TURN IT OFF! At least give the user that option.

ActionAttackJohn wrote:

What about the feature that causes it to become slower and slower as time goes on until you're forced to burn everything you own to DVD and format once a year?

Or you can just defrag your HD.

adamjg wrote:

"Balloons like that can be useful when giving information that is critical. But not stupid"

Moreover, I can't figure a way to TURN IT OFF! At least give the user that option.

Read through the thread, its been posted.

ActionAttackJohn wrote:

What about the feature that causes it to become slower and slower as time goes on until you're forced to burn everything you own to DVD and format once a year?

That's easily solved with a second hard drive loaded with apps, driver, and patches, and keeping all my stuff on my Mac

It will also works a normal move as well.

ActionAttackJohn wrote:

What about the feature that causes it to become slower and slower as time goes on until you're forced to burn everything you own to DVD and format once a year?

Registry rot?

I've got a solution for that, although its not what I'd consider ideal (ideal would be the problem never happening).

Instead of re-installing the entire OS just rebuild your user profile. Cold boot the machine, log in as an administrator and go to c:\documents and settings

Now right click on your user name and click "rename", change the name to [myusername].bak or .bad or whatever.

Log out and then log in with your account, windows will create a new default profile. Go back into documents and settings and move over your documents, desktop contents, favorites etc to your new profile folder.

Unless there is serious damage to other registry hives this can be almost as good as a full re-install of windows. Its primarily the ntuser.dat (HKEY_CURRENT_USER) registry hive that gets trashed the most from installing/removing software and everything else. The sluggishness that windows is famous for over time seems to happen more often when you install and remove a lot of software.

Creating a new profile will give you a new ntuser.dat file and 99% of the time you'll have fast performance return and all of your applications will still be installed.

ScifiterX wrote:

HackerJax wrote:

Registry rot?

Yet another of the 3,847,590,261 reasons that the registry should have been discarded by now.

Yeah its a problem. Its a major single point of failure for everything from single applications to the entire OS.

I'd almost advocate going back to .ini files again as at least they were readable text and you could easily edit and/or overwrite the file(s) when crap hit the fan. Fixing corrupted or trashed registry hives (even when you know which hive and which file you need to work with) is not for the faint of heart.

I was hoping to see the registry replaced in Vista but alas its still there in all its infamous glory.

cleekj wrote:

Booksley wrote:

Art743 wrote:

3. But absolutely worst is the inability to CUT and paste a file, as well as copy and paste. It is really difficult, and very distracting to the workflow to have to remember to go back and delete the file after moving it.

FWIW, if you select the file, drag it to another folder, then hold the command key while letting go of the mouse button, it'll do a move file instead of a copy file.

I do find myself wishing for a Cut/Copy/Paste file functionality though, you need to have two windows open or have the destination directory in a directory below the current one.

And the Finder haning on network shares is brutal. Read-only FTP is pretty bad too. FTFF!

Does this work across different physical volumes or drives? like say from a local volume to a net share?

Yeah, it'll work with any two open folder views in the Finder. You'll see the green (+) icon under the mouse disappear when you're moving instead of copying

There is a CMM that adds Move to, Copy to, Make Alias in items to the right click context menu. I've been using it for years and it is very handy.
It's called QuickAccessCM.plugin and you can find it here:
http://free.abracode.com/cmworkshop/quick_access.html

I would also strongly recommend FinderPop for additional contextual goodness. Also free (Pintware) availible here:
http://www.finderpop.com/