A good phrase to sum up the released version of Vista would be pretty,
but dumb as a doorknob.

The deeper I look, the more obvious blunders I find. For example take
Vista's default viewer that automatically pops up for graphic files.
Its a nice feature and improved over the earlier XP version. But boy,
is it dumb.



Consider this sisutation. You browse some newsgroup and download a
series of images. Like I did to test permissions. Well if you have
your news reader set to automatically decode images as you download
them and you didn't change the default of a common file type, like
..JPG then Vista will rapid fire open each image in turn WITHOUT first
closing the previous window. That's right, you select to download ten
files, Vista the dummy it is will open 10 instances of the viewer.
Download 50 images, it opens 50 instances. Open 100, well you get the
idea. Now of course aside from filling up the Task Bar and you needing
to close all those windows it of course does something else much
dumber. It will eat up your resources opening all those instances of
the same applet and crash, then it flashes your screen to add insult
to injury and for comic relief blames your video card driver when it
messed up.

A normal viewer is smart enough to open window panes, not zillions of
instances of the same application. This is easy enough to fix by
changing associations or switching viewers, but again, a sure sign the
beta testers don't have a clue and/or Microsoft was more worried about
getting Vista out the door then seeing that it worked right.

As usual it gets worse. Read this and I bet you'll get angry. Most of
us have software that we feel comfortable with. For example I love
Agent which I've used for years as my news reader. It has one of the
best online help systems too. So I was about to change the viewer to
correct the problem explained above, but I forget how. So I click on
Agent's help system.

Vista didn't like that. It says this: "The Help for this program was
created in Windows Help format, which was used in previous versions of
Windows and it is not supported in Windows Vista"

That's right folks, good chance many of your favorite programs that
did have a extensive help sytem if they were written using Windows
encouraged Help format, they're now no longer accessible. Period.

Ain't Microsoft clever?

That brought back memories of when I worked at Microsoft in 1997 and they
have an internal program that is used for tracking bugs in the software.
You guessed it, it's called RAID! I was on the OLAP project for SQL Server
and everytime the software testers found an issue with code, another entry
was made in the RAID system. When OLAP was released, there were still over
300 bugs that haven't been corrected, but they said there is a timetable for
delivery and it can't be missed. The only way it could be missed was for a
"show stopper" type of bug that brought it to its knees.

Thanks for jarring the memory.


"Adam Albright" <AA@ABC.net> wrote in message
news:g4lis296visa3h7fehgggcrdt3etu9hhs1@4ax.com...
>A good phrase to sum up the released version of Vista would be pretty,
> but dumb as a doorknob.
>
> The deeper I look, the more obvious blunders I find. For example take
> Vista's default viewer that automatically pops up for graphic files.
> Its a nice feature and improved over the earlier XP version. But boy,
> is it dumb.
>
> Consider this sisutation. You browse some newsgroup and download a
> series of images. Like I did to test permissions. Well if you have
> your news reader set to automatically decode images as you download
> them and you didn't change the default of a common file type, like
> .JPG then Vista will rapid fire open each image in turn WITHOUT first
> closing the previous window. That's right, you select to download ten
> files, Vista the dummy it is will open 10 instances of the viewer.
> Download 50 images, it opens 50 instances. Open 100, well you get the
> idea. Now of course aside from filling up the Task Bar and you needing
> to close all those windows it of course does something else much
> dumber. It will eat up your resources opening all those instances of
> the same applet and crash, then it flashes your screen to add insult
> to injury and for comic relief blames your video card driver when it
> messed up.
>
> A normal viewer is smart enough to open window panes, not zillions of
> instances of the same application. This is easy enough to fix by
> changing associations or switching viewers, but again, a sure sign the
> beta testers don't have a clue and/or Microsoft was more worried about
> getting Vista out the door then seeing that it worked right.
>
> As usual it gets worse. Read this and I bet you'll get angry. Most of
> us have software that we feel comfortable with. For example I love
> Agent which I've used for years as my news reader. It has one of the
> best online help systems too. So I was about to change the viewer to
> correct the problem explained above, but I forget how. So I click on
> Agent's help system.
>
> Vista didn't like that. It says this: "The Help for this program was
> created in Windows Help format, which was used in previous versions of
> Windows and it is not supported in Windows Vista"
>
> That's right folks, good chance many of your favorite programs that
> did have a extensive help sytem if they were written using Windows
> encouraged Help format, they're now no longer accessible. Period.
>
> Ain't Microsoft clever?
>

The Compiled Help (CHM) file format has been around for almost 10 years and
is still supported in Vista.

Maybe you should update to Agent 4.2. They claim it is "Vista Compatible"
(and judging from the help file download on their site, it uses the CHM
format).


"Adam Albright" <AA@ABC.net> wrote in message
news:g4lis296visa3h7fehgggcrdt3etu9hhs1@4ax.com...
> As usual it gets worse. Read this and I bet you'll get angry. Most of
> us have software that we feel comfortable with. For example I love
> Agent which I've used for years as my news reader. It has one of the
> best online help systems too. So I was about to change the viewer to
> correct the problem explained above, but I forget how. So I click on
> Agent's help system.
>
> Vista didn't like that. It says this: "The Help for this program was
> created in Windows Help format, which was used in previous versions of
> Windows and it is not supported in Windows Vista"
>
> That's right folks, good chance many of your favorite programs that
> did have a extensive help sytem if they were written using Windows
> encouraged Help format, they're now no longer accessible. Period.
>
> Ain't Microsoft clever?
>