More vista sh*t



  • What is it with vista, they seem to have taken everything that was streamlined in xp and made it slower and harder.

    The list begins...
    Wireless networking
    To get this to work to begin with is hell on earth as it overides the bundled WIFI driver software. But it won't automatically connect, you have to click on the icon at the bottom right to get a list of connections up then connect. But to get this list of connections to pop up you first have to wait about 1 minute while it thinks about for no apparent reason, whats that all about?

    Locking up
    So many times stuff has crashed then vista trys to shut it down but doesn't and your left with a grayed out window. So you try quiting it again nothing happens, so you try hitting ctr alt del and it doesnt work so their is no way to get the task manager up to force quit the program and you can't get it too shut down. The only thing you can do is pull the plug WTF?

    Image thumbnails
    I'm a graphic designer by trade, so the thumbnail viewing is very helpful, when it works. Thumbnail viewing on CDs is hell. It takes a long time, but completely overides doing anything else with the cd, so while its generating 100 thumbnails at 1 a minute you can't open any images copy and paste anything. And even when you turn the thumbnail view off, it still continues to make thumbnails in the background, so you still cant do anything. Crazy!

    Internet explorer
    Why wont internet explorer play WMV video files any more? And why does it randomly tell me a web page does not exist or the website may be having difficulties, when I can easily open the page in firefox at the same time?

    And why does my microsoft keyboard shortcut buttons just stop working sometimes, I mean who makes this stuff? The glass effect looks nice, but some of the basics just suck. Feel much better getting that off my chest.



  • Did they fix the broken file search feature they introduced in XP? Windows 9x's search applet actually defaulted to a sane functionality (finding the files), whereas XP defaults to asking me what type of thing I want to look for every. Single. Time.


    Probably not, they seem more interested in adding new "useful" features than making the features they already offer useful.



  • @Lingerance said:

    Did they fix the broken file search feature they introduced in XP? Windows 9x's search applet actually defaulted to a sane functionality (finding the files), whereas XP defaults to asking me what type of thing I want to look for every. Single. Time.
    Probably not, they seem more interested in adding new "useful" features than making the features they already offer useful.

    1) Open a folder in explorer.

    2) Jab the "Search" button.

    3) Swear at the annoying dog and pointless questions.

    4) Jab "change preferences" in the search pane.

    5) Jab "without an animated screen character".

    6) Swear very very loudly when XP insists on showing an animation of the dog WALKING SLOWLY AWAY.

    7) Jab "change preferences" again.

    8) Jab "change files and folders search behaviour".

    9) Select "advanced".

    10) Perform a search (any search) to save your preferences.

    11) Smile and be happy. 



  • I forgot about that!

     

    The first time I got that animation of the dog actually walking away...

    I screamed!

     Don't remember exactly WHAT I screamed, but it was something not polite.
     


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @rc_pinchey said:

    @Lingerance said:

    Did they fix the broken file search feature they introduced in XP? Windows 9x's search applet actually defaulted to a sane functionality (finding the files), whereas XP defaults to asking me what type of thing I want to look for every. Single. Time.
    Probably not, they seem more interested in adding new "useful" features than making the features they already offer useful.

    1) Open a folder in explorer.

    [snip]

    11) Smile and be happy. 

    I thought the broken behaviour mentioned was the one where you now have to add search handlers to the registry for new file types.

     e.g. at work we have plain text source code in *.ci files in our projects (don't ask.) Asking windows to find text strings in file matching *.ci won't work without a bit of registry fiddling.



  • Absolutely zero of the original poster's problems happen to me.

    However, i DO have to reset my touchpad speed every time i turn on my machine because it keeps slowing it down on reboot.  I think that's a logitech problem though, I haven't bothered to get around to fixing it because i much more often just hibernate.

    Speaking of which, I have problems getting my machine to suspend (s1) when i tell it to, which seems to be related to the java runtime for vista telling me there's an update available.  if i exit that tray icon, it normally sleeps fine.  strange! 

    But yeah, the search SUCKS.  I can never actually find the file I'm looking for, which I never had a problem with on XP.  My most anticipated feature of Vista was WinFS, and then they turfed it due to performance issues and rushed this replacement search that blows ass.  Though I'll admit I do enjoy the hybrid command-line style thing; just TYPING "putty" and pressing enter is way faster than finding it on my start menu or whatever.  Ditto for all of the icons I don't use enough to put in my quick launch but still hate to browse to.
     



  • The most "interesting" Vista WTF I had recently was when I first installed, my *Microsoft* wireless mouse refused to work! It gave me a message saying that the driver (inlcluded with Windows, I had not installed *anything* except Windows at this point), gave an error saying that it was for "Windows 95 or later" (funny, I thought Vista was later than Windows 95).

    In other words Microsoft shipped non-functional drivers for their own hardware with Vista.

    The same mouse works OTB in Linux, Mac OS X, older versions of Windows and every other OS that supports USB HID. It would have worked if Microsoft had shippped no specific driver for the mouse and just relied on standard HID, but no, they had to ship a specific driver and then fail to test it. Way to go MS.



  • You must have forgotten the secret application compatibility hacking system.



  • @rc_pinchey said:

    6) Swear very very loudly when XP insists on showing an animation of the dog WALKING SLOWLY AWAY.



    Click the stupid animal and it will vanish straightaway. With just a little practice, you can make this feel as if you're kicking it.



  • @PJH said:

    @rc_pinchey said:

    @Lingerance said:

    Did they fix the broken file search feature they introduced in XP? Windows 9x's search applet actually defaulted to a sane functionality (finding the files), whereas XP defaults to asking me what type of thing I want to look for every. Single. Time.
    Probably not, they seem more interested in adding new "useful" features than making the features they already offer useful.

    1) Open a folder in explorer.

    [snip]

    11) Smile and be happy. 

    I thought the broken behaviour mentioned was the one where you now have to add search handlers to the registry for new file types.

     e.g. at work we have plain text source code in *.ci files in our projects (don't ask.) Asking windows to find text strings in file matching *.ci won't work without a bit of registry fiddling.

    This is true, but only applies to searching within files; not plain filenames. Also, it can be done in GUI via Manage Computer and then something indexing something services, or whatever. 

    It seems annoying, but then again, if I'm looking inside source files using my text editor, I'm really not going to specify *.* as file type. So for Windows, there is some sanity to having to add searchable files manually.



  • @r3jjs said:

    I forgot about that!

     

    The first time I got that animation of the dog actually walking away...

    I screamed!

     Don't remember exactly WHAT I screamed, but it was something not polite.
     

    The paperclip turns into a bike. 



  • @misguided said:

    Absolutely zero of the original poster's problems happen to me.

    This is something that I've seen a lot of. As best I can tell, Vista is just incredibly unstable - no two people get the same behaviour from it. It's probably a huge ball of race conditions and invalid assumptions about how software will behave, so even minor variations in hardware and configuration give different combinations of defects. 



  • First few days with Vista...4MB Zip file, roughly 200 files within, 2.2Ghz core 2 duo, 2 GB ram machine....

    Right click zip file, unzip....estimated time to complete 108 mins!!!

    ..... 

    Install 7-zip, unzip, time to unzip...3-5 seconds!!

     

    Yeah, Vista sucks. 



  • @asuffield said:

    @misguided said:

    Absolutely zero of the original poster's problems happen to me.

    This is something that I've seen a lot of. As best I can tell, Vista is just incredibly unstable - no two people get the same behaviour from it. It's probably a huge ball of race conditions and invalid assumptions about how software will behave, so even minor variations in hardware and configuration give different combinations of defects. 

    It's like Windows ME all over again. Half the people loved it, and for the other half it was unstable junk.

    Time for Vista XP. 



  • @dhromed said:

    It's like Windows ME all over again. Half the people loved it
    That statement is the WTF of the day. I never met [i]anyone[/i] who loved Windows ME. At least Vista works half the time... ME was just broken.



  • @Iago said:

    @dhromed said:
    It's like Windows ME all over again. Half the people loved it
    That statement is the WTF of the day. I never met [i]anyone[/i] who loved Windows ME. At least Vista works half the time... ME was just broken.

    I'd like to call for a quick vote, if I may, so we can support this argument with some rock-solid statistics. I vote for "ME was broken".

     

    That's 100% hatred so far... this makes the ratio of ME haters to ME lovers something in the region of infinity to nil. Sounds about right. 



  • @Iago said:

    @dhromed said:
    It's like Windows ME all over again. Half the people loved it
    That statement is the WTF of the day. I never met [i]anyone[/i] who loved Windows ME. At least Vista works half the time... ME was just broken.

    I dunno. I used it for quite some time, and didn't have any troubles with it. I still have it on dual boot, in case XP goes nuts.



  • @Iago said:

    @dhromed said:
    It's like Windows ME all over again. Half the people loved it
    That statement is the WTF of the day. I never met [i]anyone[/i] who loved Windows ME. At least Vista works half the time... ME was just broken.

    My old supervisor loved win me... We ripped the piss out of him every chance we got.

    My biggest problem with vista is support for visual studio 2003... I understand not wanting to suport it, I also inderstand that the apps will convert fairly easily for most people... but MS's response if upgrade of app is not an option and you have to use vista... Install Vitual PC and run XP as well...
    Thats just great...



  • Vista works great on my Computer. The only thing is thast I cannot use dualscreen when the computer's uptime is less than some 40h. Otherwise it makes my external diplay the main and ignores the fact that it has its own screen built in. It's a laptop.

    And I hated ME. 



  • One of my gripes with Vista is that coming out of hibernation, it often briefly changes screen resolution. (Usually for under a second.)  But sometimes it stays wrong so I need to normally change it back to maximum resolution.  While that actually takes the same number of clicks as on XP, they are very different clicks and open more windows.  Not happy.



  • @Iago said:

    @dhromed said:
    It's like Windows ME all over again. Half the people loved it
    That statement is the WTF of the day. I never met [i]anyone[/i] who loved Windows ME. At least Vista works half the time... ME was just broken.

    I must say that while I don't like Windows ME, I've never had the problems everyone seems to have had. I'll even go further: my computer is from 2001, and it's still running the original installation of Windows ME. I've never had to reinstall it, and always managed to solve any problem I've had (mostly virusses and spyware).

    What do I care though, I haven't used ME for 2 years (I'm dual booting GNU/Linux on my computer nowadays, and have kept the Windows partition only because my partner still uses it).

    Just my two cents, to show that ME was not broken for everyone.
     



  • @misguided said:

    Absolutely zero of the original poster's problems happen to me.[...]

    Ditto.

    I have my own share of problems with Vista too, though. For example, it seems to forget some settings sometimes.

     Also, a few games pop a windows saying I could be running unsafe software, and ask me whether I really want to open them. This is NOT the case of the popup that asks for admin rights to do something, it's another kind of popup. The thing is, I ALWAYS check the box that says something like "don't ever ask me again before opening this one". And it ALWAYS asks again the next time.



  • @Lingerance said:

    Did they fix the broken file search feature they introduced in XP? Windows 9x's search applet actually defaulted to a sane functionality (finding the files), whereas XP defaults to asking me what type of thing I want to look for every. Single. Time.


    Probably not, they seem more interested in adding new "useful" features than making the features they already offer useful.

    It's broken in a different way now: the default is to search indexed files by content; to perform a full-disk search by name, you need to click "advanced search", specify "everywhere" as the location, then click the "include non-indexed, hidden, and system files (might be slow)" checkbox.  And yes, as promised, it's slow: a full-disk search takes about five times as long as on XP, and because of Vista's increased memory usage, it doesn't cache the directory structure, so further searches are also slow.



  • Wait I've got more. Reading peoples replies I see more things that happen to mine aswell! Hibernation sounds good, so you click it about 9pm go to bed latter on in the night, then I'm woken up by my computer randomly coming out of hibernation at 3 in the morning. Does anyone know of a way of making the hibernation button the power off button in the start menu, so you don't have to go into the little sub menu to shut down. Sometimes when I crash out of games I get the random screen res thing too, and going through more menus than xp to get to screen resolution is annoying. I think most my problems stem from using xp software on vista.

    And has anyone every had that thing where they drag a icon or file from the desktop, then to the program you want to open it in on the task bar but when you release something goes wrong and the icon stays where you dropped it, kinda washed out, and it's allways there in any window you bring up? It's weird one, used to happen on my XP machine at work all the time, well it did it in vista the otherday, I thought vista was supposed to be fresh code?



  • A lot of the power management issues came because the Vista team wanted to extend power management (kinda ironic donchathink?  My home lappytop went from an average of 2:30 hours of uptime to about 1:30 - 1:35 tops - and I can't suspend or hibernate the thing.  I had to go back to XP) - Raymend Chen talks about it here, http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/04/16/2148139.aspx as well as the Vista team blog, http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2006/12/08/windows-vista-power-management.aspx.

    They came out with a patch that, from what I have heard, fixes a ton of the power related issues.

    So many times stuff has crashed then vista trys to shut it down but doesn't and your left with a grayed out window. So you try quiting it again nothing happens, so you try hitting ctr alt del and it doesnt work so their is no way to get the task manager up to force quit the program and you can't get it too shut down. The only thing you can do is pull the plug WTF?

    I call BS.  WTF are you doing that an application crashes like that?

    To get this to work to begin with is hell on earth as it overides the bundled WIFI driver software. But it won't automatically connect, you have to click on the icon at the bottom right to get a list of connections up then connect. But to get this list of connections to pop up you first have to wait about 1 minute while it thinks about for no apparent reason, whats that all about?

    I've used 4 Netgear and D-Link wireless cards in my laptop and desktop and never once had this happen.  And of course it doesn't auto-connect any more, it was a huge complaint and security issue.  Do some research on the topic :)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Carnildo said:

    It's broken in a different way now: the default is to search indexed files by content; to perform a full-disk search by name, you need to click "advanced search", specify "everywhere" as the location, then click the "include non-indexed, hidden, and system files (might be slow)" checkbox. And yes, as promised, it's slow: a full-disk search takes about five times as long as on XP, and because of Vista's increased memory usage, it doesn't cache the directory structure, so further searches are also slow.

    In addition, given the 'search handlers' I alluded to elsethread, not only do they search file(name)s everywhere, they also (by default  IIRC) search file(name)s in zip files. So the search has to go to the expense of opening such archives to find stuff you weren't interested in.



  • I don't have Vista on any of my computers, but my neighbout does, and let's just say that I've made quite a bit of money since he bought that laptop. There's a ton of problems with wireless - it seems to randomly forget the WPA key every now and then, and the connections dialog does take about a minute to pop up.



  • @asuffield said:

    ...a huge ball of race conditions and invalid assumptions about how software will behave, so even minor variations in hardware and configuration give different combinations of defects.

    You've described half the COTS software on the market.



  • @kirchhoff said:

    @asuffield said:

    ...a huge ball of race conditions and invalid assumptions
    about how software will behave, so even minor variations in hardware
    and configuration give different combinations of defects.

    You've described half the COTS software on the market.

    That is why we call it Crap On The Shelf...



  • @ShadowWolf said:

    I call BS.  WTF are you doing that an application crashes like that?

    To get this to work to begin with is hell on earth as it overides the bundled WIFI driver software. But it won't automatically connect, you have to click on the icon at the bottom right to get a list of connections up then connect. But to get this list of connections to pop up you first have to wait about 1 minute while it thinks about for no apparent reason, whats that all about?

    I've used 4 Netgear and D-Link wireless cards in my laptop and desktop and never once had this happen.  And of course it doesn't auto-connect any more, it was a huge complaint and security issue.  Do some research on the topic :)

    Looking at PDF's mainly makes it crash like that. And aren't you a lucky b*stard to have a wireless card that works with vista. I have a built in one on my ASUS M2N32SLi mobo and it hates it, I also have randomly forgetting WEP key issue. And when you install the updated drivers through windows update the internet never works again and you have to roll back to your old drivers. Which is nice.



  • Looking at PDF's mainly makes it crash like that. And aren't you a lucky b*stard to have a wireless card that works with vista. I have a built in one on my ASUS M2N32SLi mobo and it hates it, I also have randomly forgetting WEP key issue. And when you install the updated drivers through windows update the internet never works again and you have to roll back to your old drivers. Which is nice.

    So your PDF software is a piece of complete garbage that's doing some horrendous IO stuff or somehow managing to avoid the kill messages and ASUS has gone down the crapper and can't write a driver worth the crap.  I doubt either issue has anything to do Vista.

    Well, thanks for letting me know about ASUS, I've been a loyal buyer for years.  I bought a house a couple'a years ago, though, so I haven't been able to upgrade much of anything since.  I'll have to look again before buying I think.



  • @ShadowWolf said:

    So your PDF software is a piece of complete garbage that's doing some horrendous IO stuff or somehow managing to avoid the kill messages and ASUS has gone down the crapper and can't write a driver worth the crap.  I doubt either issue has anything to do Vista.

    Well, thanks for letting me know about ASUS, I've been a loyal buyer for years.  I bought a house a couple'a years ago, though, so I haven't been able to upgrade much of anything since.  I'll have to look again before buying I think.

    Hear, hear! Another case of "Everything's Microsofts' fault!" identified. I think the only thing I haven't heard them blamed for is someone's car having a flat tire... Of course, someone will figure out a way to blame them for that as well. "Oh, the tire store had a computer that was running Windows. It must have somehow affected the new tires on the shelves, and then one of the affected tires got put on my car, and now it's flat! Bill Gates sux! Microsoft sux! Windows blows!"

    I've got a Broadcom wireless card in my notebook that works fine. I also have a wireless signal booster I use for traveling (Hawking Technologies) that works fine. So apparently someone can correctly design drivers for Vista. Can't be all MS's fault now, can it?

    And for PDFs, Boris must still be using Adobe Acrobat Reader. He should try Foxit instead; it's about 1000 times faster in loading PDFs than Acrobat Reader is, and works fine with every single file I've opened. It's free like Acrobat Reader, too, so there's no reason to still be using Acrobat Reader.



  • @KenW said:

    And for PDFs, Boris must still be using Adobe Acrobat Reader. He should try Foxit instead; it's about 1000 times faster in loading PDFs than Acrobat Reader is, and works fine with every single file I've opened. It's free like Acrobat Reader, too, so there's no reason to still be using Acrobat Reader.

    Reader 8 is real fucking fast.

    At least compared to 7 and lower, that is.

    In any case I don't really have an incentive anymore to look further. :\ :)



  • In my experience, Foxit loads instantly, but is a bit slower when rendering pages, while Acrobat takes a few seconds to load, but displays the pages instantly.

     

    And speaking of Acrobat 8, is there any way to make the damn thing respect my UI colors of choice (or at least render text in black [instead of my Windows text color] if it insists on white background)?



  • @ShadowWolf said:

    Looking at PDF's mainly makes it crash like that. And aren't you a lucky b*stard to have a wireless card that works with vista. I have a built in one on my ASUS M2N32SLi mobo and it hates it, I also have randomly forgetting WEP key issue. And when you install the updated drivers through windows update the internet never works again and you have to roll back to your old drivers. Which is nice.

    So your PDF software is a piece of complete garbage that's doing some horrendous IO stuff or somehow managing to avoid the kill messages and ASUS has gone down the crapper and can't write a driver worth the crap.  I doubt either issue has anything to do Vista.

    Well, thanks for letting me know about ASUS, I've been a loyal buyer for years.  I bought a house a couple'a years ago, though, so I haven't been able to upgrade much of anything since.  I'll have to look again before buying I think.

    Yes I'm using acrobat reader 8, but who'd have thought the software from people who inveted the PDF wouldn't work with vista. Yes I admit to a bit of vista bashing, and I've already admitted that most crashes are due to the fact I'm using xp software on vista. But when your computer crashes or locks up you automatically shout, "piece of sh*t vista, at least I could view PDFs on xp!". But on the upside, the glass effect looks nice.



  • But on the upside, the glass effect looks nice.

    LOL!



  •  Well, I have been toying around with vista for quite some time, so I think I have a couple of remarks on this.

    @Boris the Blade said:


    Wireless networking
    To get this to work to begin with is hell on earth as it overides the bundled WIFI driver software. But it won't automatically connect, you have to click on the icon at the bottom right to get a list of connections up then connect. But to get this list of connections to pop up you first have to wait about 1 minute while it thinks about for no apparent reason, whats that all about?

    The 30-60 second delay is frequently due to either IPv6 (which is broken to all get out) or a badly programmed firewall.  I shaved 30 sec of the connect time by disabling IPv6, the rest by uninstalling the Comodo firewall 3 beta.  Now it works just great, which is completely unlike Linux which would have its connection go down after 5 minutes and force a reconnect.

     

    @mrbandersnatch said:

    First few days with Vista...4MB Zip file, roughly 200 files within, 2.2Ghz core 2 duo, 2 GB ram machine....

    Right click zip file, unzip....estimated time to complete 108 mins!!!

    ..... 

    Install 7-zip, unzip, time to unzip...3-5 seconds!!

     

    Yeah, Vista sucks. 

    Hmm, odd, on my compy (significantly slower by the looks of it), the built in zip program unzips a 15mb archive with 2k files in it in 40 sec, but that's slow compared to 7zip which unzipped a 200mb file at 130Mb/s.  I don't know what would cause that other than a poor time estimate by the program. 



  • Windows search?

    I stick to dir /s or grep.exe. Nice to be able to put the results in a text file with no effort, too.

    I don't think I'll ever delete the "Command Prompt" shortcut from my quick launch menu...



  • @aib said:

    Windows search?

    I stick to dir /s or grep.exe. Nice to be able to put the results in a text file with no effort, too.

    I don't think I'll ever delete the "Command Prompt" shortcut from my quick launch menu...

    Install cygwin and add a shortcut to bash. You'll be rid of cmd.exe in no time. 



  • @asuffield said:

    @aib said:

    Windows search?

    I stick to dir /s or grep.exe. Nice to be able to put the results in a text file with no effort, too.

    I don't think I'll ever delete the "Command Prompt" shortcut from my quick launch menu...

    Install cygwin and add a shortcut to bash. You'll be rid of cmd.exe in no time. 

    Too bad Cygwin is stuck in the same barely-functional text-mode window that cmd.exe is...

    Are there any decent terminal emulators for Windows?



  • @djork said:

    @asuffield said:
    @aib said:

    Windows search?

    I stick to dir /s or grep.exe. Nice to be able to put the results in a text file with no effort, too.

    I don't think I'll ever delete the "Command Prompt" shortcut from my quick launch menu...

    Install cygwin and add a shortcut to bash. You'll be rid of cmd.exe in no time. 

    Too bad Cygwin is stuck in the same barely-functional text-mode window that cmd.exe is...

    Are there any decent terminal emulators for Windows?

    You can install the X server and run a real terminal emulator under cygwin. It's somewhat involved to set up, but once you've got it running it's both painless and seamless.



  • @asuffield said:

    You can install the X server and run a real terminal emulator under cygwin. It's somewhat involved to set up, but once you've got it running it's both painless and seamless.
    Setting up X on Windows is very simple with Xming. Just download & install, and then add DISPLAY=:0 to your environment (cygwin should pick it up automatically).



  • @asuffield said:

    @aib said:

    Windows search?

    I stick to dir /s or grep.exe. Nice to be able to put the results in a text file with no effort, too.

    I don't think I'll ever delete the "Command Prompt" shortcut from my quick launch menu...

    Install cygwin and add a shortcut to bash. You'll be rid of cmd.exe in no time. 

     

    Got'em. I don't like them, though, probably because of the false sense of linux-ness they bring. CMD + UnxUtils are sufficient for now. (\.\GLOBAL??\ needs some more character devices, though :)

    And about the X server: Cygwin/X is great. I haven't tested the OpenGL acceleration, but native windows and the small X icon in the taskbar do it for me. (I hate it when Win32 X servers open a desktop-sized window and put all the clients in it)
     



  • @mrbandersnatch said:

    First few days with Vista...4MB Zip file, roughly 200 files within, 2.2Ghz core 2 duo, 2 GB ram machine....

    Right click zip file, unzip....estimated time to complete 108 mins!!!

    ..... 

    Install 7-zip, unzip, time to unzip...3-5 seconds!!

     

    Yeah, Vista sucks. 

     

    I've always been amazed at how awful the built-in Windows unzipper was.  I've never experienced anything as bad as 108 minutes for a 4MB file on the XP version (never used the Vista version), but the XP unzipper absolutely chokes on larger archives (size or file wise).  I'm guessing it does something fundamentally stupid like trying to load the whole archive into memory, uncompress it (also all into memory) and then write it out to a file. 



  • @bighusker said:

    I've always been amazed at how awful the built-in Windows unzipper was.  I've never experienced anything as bad as 108 minutes for a 4MB file on the XP version (never used the Vista version), but the XP unzipper absolutely chokes on larger archives (size or file wise).  I'm guessing it does something fundamentally stupid like trying to load the whole archive into memory, uncompress it (also all into memory) and then write it out to a file. 

    I'm not sure offhand about the buffering, but I do know that it writes the uncompressed data to disk, then reads it back into memory, then writes it back to disk again.



  • @asuffield said:

    @bighusker said:

    I've always been amazed at how awful the built-in Windows unzipper was.  I've never experienced anything as bad as 108 minutes for a 4MB file on the XP version (never used the Vista version), but the XP unzipper absolutely chokes on larger archives (size or file wise).  I'm guessing it does something fundamentally stupid like trying to load the whole archive into memory, uncompress it (also all into memory) and then write it out to a file. 

    I'm not sure offhand about the buffering, but I do know that it writes the uncompressed data to disk, then reads it back into memory, then writes it back to disk again.

    Do you also happen to know how the picture/fax viewer manages to be so slow?



  • @aib said:

    Do you also happen to know how the picture/fax viewer manages to be so slow?


    Or why it requires one to overwrite the current image to view a rotated copy of it and warns you about said operation destroying the quality of the image?



  • @Boris the Blade said:

    Does anyone know of a way of making the hibernation button the power off button in the start menu, so you don't have to go into the little sub menu to shut down.

    Go into the power management settings, hit advanced, scroll down to power button, under that there's an option for what the button in the start menu will do. (Button names are paraphrased, I don't have Vista on this machine... just at work. It's not too hard to find though.) Take note though: the start menu button will now shut down your machine without any confirmation prompts. Don't click it by mistake.

    @djork said:
    Are there any decent terminal emulators for Windows?

    Cygwin has a port of rxvt that doesn't depend on X11... just runs straight under win32api. Install that, and add a shortcut to C:\cygwin\bin\run.exe C:\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe -bg black -fg white -sb -e /bin/bash -l



  • @Lingerance said:

    @aib said:

    Do you also happen to know how the picture/fax viewer manages to be so slow?


    Or why it requires one to overwrite the current image to view a rotated copy of it and warns you about said operation destroying the quality of the image?

    Because it tries to be an editor as well.

    But JPG can sometimes be rotated, flipped or cropped losslessly, if the image dimensions are a multiple of 8.

     



  • @Boris the Blade said:


    I'm a graphic designer by trade,

    Get a Macintosh? sigh....I've been saying it since 1984. And this being said by someone who uses a PC for a living! (sighsigh*, insert bullet, spin chamber...).  


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