It never ceases to me amaze me just how badly some software is writen and designed. One major one that really irks me is "Microsft Word 97" . They put the print button (which just prints a document without brining up the print menu) directly beside the print preview and save buttons. I can't count the amount of times I've accidently hit that •••••• button trying to save a document or to preview it. And there is no way to customize the toolbar to remove it! It is beyond belief that microsoft would relase software with such a flaw! (yes I do know that office 97 is old now, but it was the last 'good' version, 2000 was basically little more then 97 with a few extra features and bells and whistles, and XP has an activation wizard, which makes it do an instant shark jump)

Windows 98, while old and (at leats according to Microsoft) obsolete now with XP being out was in my opinion the last good OS. Why? Because XP tries to automate far too many things! For example, there is no way to turn off "autoplay" (ie auto intsert notification) in XP, and in display control panel, you can forget about saving changes to your windows colour if you make any, because it forced you to save it as a 'theme' which is a total pain in the ass. I mean themes save wallapaper, sounds and everything, it's •••••• to have to save an entire theme just to make the colour of my windows (or whatever) a little darker or lighter!

I'm sure there are countless other examples of •••••• features in software we use everyday. So thats why I created this discussion, basically as a place to vent about such features we can do little about, but knowing that others hate that feature as well as leats makes a person feel better knowing their not alone.

Win2K is also good. Of the "Consumer Windows" (95, 95OSR2, 98, 98SE, and Me), 98SE is far and away the best of the bunch.

Of all MS's Windows offerings, I'd have to say that Win2K (for "Commercial Grade") and Win98SE are the best.

Oh, to turn off Autoplay, download the Powertoys, in particular TweakUI (I think it's available for XP). TweakUI will let you turn it off.

I turned off Autoplay using TweakUI, and now I can't turn it back on despite what the hardware settings (Auto-Insert Notification) say! Help!

Whenever I'm writing a post at TrekNation in which I'm using formatting tags, which use a "[" and then an "i" for italic or "b" for bold, the computer will automatically capitalize the "i" because it thinks I'm using it as a personal pronoun. It also takes it upon itself to continue numbering sequences at the beginning of paragraphs, even if I don't want it to. I wish there was some way to turn that thing off.

Often when I highlight a word and click the Spellcheck, it'll start with some word before the one I clicked, even though I didn't click that one. THAT's annoying.

There is.

1. Don't use Word to compse TrekNation posts (use Wordpad or Notepad... or even better, VIM).
2. If you do use word, go into Tools=>Autocorrect... and turn off (on various tabs) automatic capitalization and automatic list numbering.

What really annoys me is progress bars in Windows, particularly the ones which suggest a remaining time. They always seem to get the estimated time to do something wrong, and as you get close to the end, with 1 second remaining, suddenly pauses for up to a minute before finishing.

Ah, yes... the infamous "Microsoft Minute".

I hate it when playing some games that cause the comp to freeze and even ctrl+alt+del won't do a frickin' thing for it. Many times I've had no choice but to unplug the comp from the surge protector and then I get the scandisk cuz of an improper shutdown. Whenever there's any reason for an improper shutdown the comp should say why, or else the comp should come with a thick manual listing the various reasons why it happens (along with everything needed to be known about the comp, such as its various features), and explain them in detail cuz of course most comp owners don't know all that much about the darn things. Sometimes the comp automatically restarts, again prompting the scandisk. I've been having these troubles lately playing SOF2, which is still fun otherwise.

XP does not let me bypass the "login" screen. The one where, if you didn't have a password, the first time you could hit enter and it'd go straight into the startup everytime thereafter.

Every single time, I have to hit "enter" on my keyboard just to continue. I saw the tab for options on the login, so I hit that, thinking I could maybe customize it. My only option was...shut down.

Neither me nor a Windows geek friend of mine can figure it out.

Oh yeah...and is there a way to turn off those gawdawful "balloon notes" that appear with it? I get it for "new updates" and for "new hardware installed." Annoys the heck out of me.

Whoo!

Nevermind on the login bit...TweakUI is my friend.

I think I also got those stup...moronic balloons shut off.

But...does anyone else think that it's sad MS doesn't offer that login option for...the ONLY user on the account?

That's odd. They offered it as an option (at least during install) for Win2K.

BTW, just to clarify for anyone who may wonder, SOF2 is short for Soldier of Fortune 2.

It looks like you're writing a letter.
Would you like me to:

A) Bollox it up for you?
or
B) **** off and leave you alone?

One for all you fans of That Blasted Paperclip™: please see this before it goes away!

Hackers love old M$ IIS webservers. Just go to the Music->RIAA board and laugh.

Is that Gilbert Godfried?

That is indeed Gilbert Gottfried, Merat.

So, this is an OFFICIAL MS game?! Wow. They actually have a sense of humor!

Heres another annoying one. Just say you have a video and want to get a screen cap (by video I'm taking one that you plau in media player). I always hate how it takes multiple print screens before it will appear when you 'paste' (often the video will appear blank). Makes it kind of hard to get those screen caps. Normally you'd think scrolling on the progress bar for the movie (ie the one that allows you to scroll through the video) and stopping at a certain point would (if it was paused) put the paused image at the 'new' point but often it doesent and you must hit play to get it to go to it (and even then it will often take a few second to 'unlock' the image while the audio plays)

Outlook Express has a checkbox to disconnect from the Internet after sending/receiving mail. Nice idea.

The problem is, it disconnects even if I'm using Internet Explorer 6 to browse the web at the time! Than you so much...
(IE5 didn't do this provided I ran IE before Outlook.)

And then there's the "disconnect if idle for x minutes" feature. It disconnects while downloading files and sending mail with big attachments. Apparently sending and receiving data constitutes "not doing anything".

We make the products that make you happy. We make the products with the high quality you demand.

Despite any facts to the contrary, we are right.

We love consolidation, and want to own everything! Want to join our colletive?

...help me...help me

You're mine. You're all mine! I own you all! I control you all! II control all your thoughts! I AM you all! I know everything you do. I hear everything you say. I am everywhere you are and you'll never get rid of me! NEVER!!! Mwahahahahaha!!!

What I hate with Netscape (I dunno if IE does this, or some equivalent) is that sometimes I get that "Retry" popup for no reason that's explained to me, and when I click its retry button the box just blinks and doesn't disappear at all! Even its close button is useless. Why does this popup appear and more importantly why won't it close?

I just read a cartoon where one person tell another that they are tired of arguing with their e-mail spell checker. Hence forth he shall be known as "Kettle Bowler" not "Kenneth Fowler."

I know tye feeling. The former human serivices director where I worked was sensative about her name and got upset when I sent her an e-mail calling her a sweater type because I was busy and hit (change all) without thinking about it. [Cone Oiler was amused as was Bill (No Suggestions).]

I know tye feeling.
I guess that spell checker argument is quite prevalent.

Luigi,

"Tye" is a perfectly good word. It is a type of Australian possum. Well sort of like a possum but a marsupial. I've used it many Scrabble^TM games.

In that case, Blue, you could get lifted for indecent assault on antipodean wildlife.

William, an o'possum is a marsupial. I think it's North America's only native marsupial if I remember nature class correctly.

Here's a Fun Thing™ you can do on MS Word 97. Change the dictionary to US English. Then type in "Unable to follow direction", select the whole phrase and activate the Thesaurus, and see what you get. There is another phrase which I'll not post as it might be seen as an attack on Bill Gates.

More fun with Word 97. Type in the phrase "I’d like to see Bill gates dead", then as witht he above select the entire phrase and activate the thesauraus.

Butch Brookshier,

Thanks. I know. It was part of the "" in my obviously lying about "tye" being a real word.

Try this sentence out, "I know opossum feeling." So I don't admit to anything illegal in some states I'll say that makes no sense.

Of course the most idiotic feature in MS software is stealing the focus (ie a windows forces itself to the 'front' without you doing anything), the various tricks to stop it don't work, and it is unbelievable that MS put such an annoying and obnoxious feature in windows.

AOL's Instant Messaging program. The tendency to have a new window steal the focus is annoying as get out. Especially when you're in the middle of typing to someone, and half your paragraph gets sent to the second person, who then goes "Huh?".

Or when you hit the spacebar and find yourself in a chat with a bunch of obnoxious hicks from Alabama - the chat you were trying to avoid. I've been forced to put my settings to "Reject all chat invites" because of it.

---

Quote:

Or when you hit the spacebar and find yourself in a chat with a bunch of obnoxious hicks from Alabama - the chat you were trying to avoid

---

CC,

You are from Tennesse, not Alabama or Georgia. Remember?

I wasn't aware you were an obnoxious hick from Alabama, Hannah. I'm referring to the OTHER experiences - I think someone sent the invite to the wrong person.

But if you're an obnoxious hick from Alabama...*lifts a brow*

If it helps any, you both can ignore me. I am an obnoxious (enter derogatory term here) from Massachsetts.

Okay. Just checking.

You are from Tennesse, not Alabama or Georgia.

Hey I'm from georgia, what eveactly are you saying? BTW that was just a joke. I'm not one to get onto someone for saying something bad about obnoxious hicks from GA seeing as me and my buddies almost got into a fist fight with 4 obnoxious GA hicks just last week.

I used to think CC was from Georgia because she is an Atlanta Braves fan. There are obnoxious hicks in Massachusetts too. (They just have a different accent.)

Lately, when I'm surfing with Internet Explorer, I've gotten some really obnoxious pop-up windows. They refuse to allow me to close them, minimize them or switch back to the window I was browsing. Most of the time I wind up having to Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring up the kill program box and kill all my IE windows and start all over and hope to finish before the pop-up shows up again.

They don't quite take over Netscape the same way, but I expect that that is just a matter of time.

There are a few sites that I really liked I do not visit any longer. I wrote to the webmasters the reason I would no longer be visiting, but I doubt that things will change, except for the worse.

TomM, about a year ago, satirical magazine "Private Eye" ran an article about how there is an increasing amount of intrusive advertising (telemarketing, newspaper inserts, online pop-ups, and general e-junk and snailmail junk). It seems this doesn't seem to be a phenomenon restricted to computer software.

Just to be on the safe side, try downloading a utility to eliminate these pop-ups - try something like Web Window Killer and (my current flavour of the month) Ad-Aware. [Oops... - everyone]

Mozilla (latest stable release 1.0.1) has a nice function to disable popups and other javascript-related annoyances.

Tom, Disable Active Scripting.

Electron, 1.1 is also stable.

Opera has a function to refuse pop up windows, but it's kind of bizarre. I have it set to refuse pop ups, and most of the time it works. But there are times when it doesn't work.

Now THAT'S annoying.

One of the most annoying.

"you must have the cd in the drive to play"

I translate that as

"please delete this game and return it"

Over the pas few years copy protection has gotten more and more out of control. I understand that software companies want to stop piracy, but the simple fact is that copy protection and other annoying things like "please insert the cd to play" do not stop piracy! The reason? Often, even before a new protection scheme is released, there is a 'crack' for it available.

All these copy protection things do is prevent legiamite users from making legitmate copies of software for backup purposes.

Auto eject, very annoying when I format a directcd cd, and it auto ejectcs it when I'm done. Normally I will want to use that same cd after formatting it, so ejecting it seems silly!

I also find it annoying when (for a game for example) I write a script (resisting urge to spell it scpipt) and compile and it wont compile because of one tiny error that it knows the solution to! Or how in many map editors for games, say you have one thing in a level that it 'doesent know' , how it refuses to open the entire level because of that, rather then to do the smart thing and simply open the level but not display the thing it doesent know (or put a question mark where it is)

I'm with you on the copy protection, Chris. It's never done any good in all my years of computing. Take Command and Conquer Renegade for example. Before I bought the game I decided I had to evaluate it. I had heard some overwhelmingly negative reviews and I wasn't about to go out and spend $50 on it if I wasn't going to like it. So I found a copy on Kazaa and away I went. No serial number required, no swapping of CDs and the game ran just fine. Sure there were no movies and no manual but it was easy enough to figure out. But I decided that I liked the game enough to support Westwood, so I laid down the cash and bought the game. And I like the pirated version better!
Also, I'd have to say that if a program uses a serial number for copy protection, it doesn't really have any protection at all. Has anyone ever had trouble finding a serial for any program at all?
Software pirates aren't going to be stopped by any current means. I watched a popular website leak the Windows XP service pack right from the first beta builds all the way up to the final release... and they got the final from Microsoft days before it was supposed to be released at all! All this with complete and detailed instructions on how to change your product key (from the famous FCKGW) and slipstream the service pack so you could burn it onto a CD and never have to deal with a product key again!

The "You must ahve the CD in the drive to play" may simply be that there's 650Megs of video/textures/sounds. That's not necessarily copy protection. If you can't make a backup copy of the CD, that's different.

How about driver and game updates that don't update anything? For example, Windows XP service pack one, which doesn't seem to do much more than fix a bunch of bugs that shouldn't have been there in the first place! Or the "latest" video card drivers from ATI... the stock drivers that come with XP work just fine... but the new ones are supposed to add... what? Functionality? Better quality? Stability? I don't notice any particular difference between the drivers of last year and the drivers of last week. It would be nice if they at least included a text file that explains why these latest drivers are so good to have...

I got so frustered with XP, I returned the computer to the store a week later. Then I went back to using my old one with 98. My biggest complaint was I tried to setup my desktop identical to the way I had it on 98 and it kept giving me all kinds of error messages. I also agree with above the login screen was annoying and completely unnecessay. I mean it's a nice option if you have multiple users on one computer, but I'm the only one who uses it. After a couple of days I tried deleting XP and replacing it with 98 but it wouldn't let me do it.

IIRC as a single user on XP Home you can disable the login screen. Btw, it took me two days to install this "O"S on my brother's computer. A truly horrible experience. But I was victorious and now it even works.

I stay with Win98/Linux on my computer.

I'm a single user on XPH. Didn't work.

I had to get TweakUI to get that fixed.

The thing I hated, that p---ed me off was when I tried to adjust memory myself, and it reset the Classics Theme to the XP Theme.

I about screamed bloody murder.

Oh yes, it always goes back to XP style when you change something. Bill Gates still needs many, many pies in his face!

Well, of course. Why would you want anything other than the wonderful eXPerience we've provided?

Going waaaaaaay back to the very first post on this board.

Chris, go to Tools=>Customize. You should be able to drag&Drop the Print button. Either to where you want it, or to the customize dialog (to delete it).

Yep, it does work. I discovered it by accident a while ago. It's much nicer without that little print button there :D

Not including a command line interface in programs. 'nuff said.

I hate it when a program is busy doing a function, and they don't have a status bar or anything else to indicate that the program didn't indeed crash. I also hate it when programmers don't optimize their code, and a function runs S__L__O__W__L__Y when it dosen't have to.

I also hate it when programmers don't optimize their code, and a function runs S__L__O__W__L__Y when it dosen't have to.

And exactly how do you know that's what happened?

One example: Nero CD burning software. On my old pentium 166, whenever I wanted to pick and choose files from my HD to burn onto the CD, the program would take over 40 seconds to list the directory. This same wait would happen after I select a file or a directory to add to the list of files I want to burn. Most other programs I use show the list of files aalmost in an instant, and there is no wait time when selecting files or changing directories.

BTW: 40 seconds is a *very* long time, especialy when repeated over and over. :[

That sounds like a problem with your hardware or drivers.

The bug in Nero (if any) was not letting you select multiple files/directories at once. Odds are that Nero used the *MICROSOFT PROVIDED* common dialogs for file selection.

It wasn't Ahead Software's fault.

I don't think it's a windows common dialog, because of the way the window looks, but even if it was, they managed to make it far slower than the other programs that use the M$ provided dialogs. I don't think it's a driver/hardware issue because none of my other programs behave this way.

For anyone who's ever tried to cancel an AOL account, today's UserFriendly has the obvious perspective on the AOL layoffs.

er, JohnA, I tried your dvd player link and it still won't run any dvd region code disk. Can someone else help me?

You need to set the region on the player.

There should be a "select region" button (or feature) somewhere.