1. DWM (Desktop Window Manager, the service that runs Aero) is consuming 158MB “Working Set”, which I believe to be non-paged RAM.
2. Still has crappy multi-monitor support. Even if I overlook the fact that I had to get a driver written this month to get all my adapters to run Aero Glass, Windows Vista still doesn’t have support for:
- Wallpapers spanning multiple screens, unless you use the photoshop pixel manipulation trick
- GroupBar, from Microsoft Research, which organizes the taskbar better.
- Running seperate screensavers on different monitors
- All screensaver options have beeen completely removed. You’re stuck with what Microsoft decided were the optimal default settings.
- Some screensavers (i.e. Windows Energy) only run on one screen.
- Why do they keep removing old screensavers? I’d love to see the old 3dMaze.scr running on this system.
3. Windows have large areas that could be effectively glassed, but they aren’t. For example, the MDI grid in the Task Manager’s Processes tab could be transparent with shadowed white text for contrast.
4. The Location Settings dialog box still won’t let you exit without entering an area code, or forcibly killing the process.
5. The Performance grading software (winsat.exe) still crashes every time I run it.
6. When I have a File-Open or File-SaveAs dialog open and keyboard focus is on the FileName TextBox, pressing Shift-Tab should move focus to the files within the Explorer MDI child control. I shouldn’t have to tab all over the window like a 508c Accessibility user; the keyboard is supposed to be faster than the mouse. That’s why it has all those keys.
7. Some of the icons still look XPish.
8. Internet Explorer 7 sucks donkey balls. It comes with Vista.
9. Random freezing and BSOD’s that didn’t exist in XP.
10. Vista build 5308 had a nicer glass effect than RTM and SP1 do. As you moved a window around, the glass would refract differently what lies underneath.
11. Some Explorer and Internet Explorer windows randomly climb to 100% CPU and stay there until restarted.
12. Forcing a Virtual PC instance to a processor affinity does not prevent Virtual PC from using the other processor(s).
13. File Move and Copy dialogs should be always-expanded.
14. Task Manager and Performance Monitor controls that monitor network utilization should measure per second; not per minute or “interval”. Every network traffic measurement in the world is based on activity per second (Bps, KBps, MBps, GBps, etc)
15. Sidebar takes up way too much memory. Applets should be forced to behave.
16. Why are system notification icons separated from other notification icons in my notification area? When the TaskBar is docked to a side of a screen, this can cause two icons to consume about 30 extra pixels along the Y axis. If your TaskBar is configured to 300px wide like mine, this wastes 9,000 pixels of valuable desktop space. I could fit an entire additional window indicator button into that space.
17. Why has the Date and Time window been split into two (A View window and an Edit window)?
18. Why are users coming out with better Sidebar widgets than Microsoft?
19. Why did they change the shortcuts around so much? One example: In an Explorer window, I used to be able to change to View-by-Type mode via Alt-V, I, T. Now it’s Alt-V, O, T.
20. Media Center is still wonky.
21. Media Center is still being called “Media Center Edition” like it’s a different edition of Windows. It’s just another program that runs on top of Windows Vista “Ultimate Edition”.
22. Why can’t I disable that annoying Favorites & Folders Explorer Bar altogether? All I can do is make it really small, or resize my Explorer windows so the Explorer Bar can’t fit.
23. When I boot up, I am greeted by alternating forms of pure blackness. The screens turn on and initialize; then five of them turn off; then the other one turns off; then they all go into standby; then they all wake up to the Vista Orb just before the login screen. It seriously looks like my computer froze at boot.
24. Why isn’t Consolas set as a default font for anything? Consolas was developed specifically for Vista’s Raster Font engine for ClearType. It’s an awesome font, and ClearType is an awesome technology. Why not push it out to begin with and remind people of the sense of awe they got when they noticed how crisp the text in Windows 3.11 seemed when loading it from DOS?
25. A long time ago, I think it was in Windows NT, we had a “Step by Step” boot option. Bring this back; or for the love of God, at least tell me what you’re doing during boot. Even when the /NOGUIBOOT boot.ini parameter, all I get is the drivers as they’re loaded. Study the linux boot UI for a few seconds and you’ll see what I want during boot: A complete list of everything being done, and whether it happened successfully or not, and why not.
26. Be more descriptive. When you say “Copying Windows Files” at install-time, which Windows File are you on right now? When you say “Installing Features”, what features?
27. Winver.exe still says Windows is Copyright 2006.
28. Bring back old DOS-style defrag and scandisk. Those are programs I can justify taking up a whole screen. Only instead of one 8×8 character meaning 65,536 clusters, it would be more along the lines of one pixel = 512KB (~1,000 sectors). You can colorize it for things like “Good”, “Some Bad Sectors”, “All Bad Sectors”, and use brightness to indicate where on the disk the sectors belong.
- It seems that as we move forward, less and less information is being conveyed to the user. It disgusts me.
29. For the love of God, please please please come up with some way to enable more configuration and verbose output for advanced users. Not everyone needs to have their hand held to browse a web page. I recommend measuring the user’s abilities over time and dynamically providing easier or more complex control, depending on a score similar to the Performance score. And give me a way to override it.
30. Wordpad can see some basic aspects of Word documents without installing Word, while providing some limited editing capability. This is good. Now provide an Excelpad.
31. Triple-clicking a titlebar should collapse the window like in WindowBlinds.
32. Microsoft got rid of MPlayer2 in Vista, and replaced its executable with a damned copy of WMPlayer.exe. Media Player 2 has its flaws when compared to WinAmp, but I’ll take it over WMP 9 thru 11 eight days a week.
33. Windows Media Player 11 still has crappy multi-monitor support, an ugly UI, and unintuitive navigation. Dragging a media file into it should ALWAYS load the file, start playback, and show me that playback. I don’t want your URGE store, visualization menus, playlists, and all the other crap bloating the UI. I just want a damn media playback rectangle with a thin border so I can tell where it ends and the desktop begins. That’s all i want in my media player.
34. Vista has native support for WPF. Why don’t I see more of it?
35. Where’s all the cool photo manipulation functionality I’ve been seeing videos of from Microsoft Research?
36. Where’s all the cool functionality I’ve been seeing videos of from the MSFT VIBE lab?
37. Windows Ultimate Extras aren’t very Ultimate.
38. Undo is Ctrl-Z. This is a universal standard. Now, decide whether Redo should be Ctrl-Y, Shift-Ctrl-Z, or Shift-Alt-Backspace (zomg wtf?). Pick one, and use that everywhere. Shoving Backspace into a Redo hotkey combination is as out of place as the ‘G’ in the word “Through”.
39. Media Center should have one central place for a file Library, not three. It should automatically detect which files belong in Audio, Video, and Images; and display only the appropriate types when I browse to the Audio, Video, and Images sections of Media Center. My videos and video shouldn’t be mixed in with my audio just because I told Media Center to index three entire drives.
40. Media Center full-screen playback should have more options:
- I should be able to say “Disable all screens but this one when I’m playing a full-screen video”. The other screens will completely turn off when the video starts, and turn back on when I come out of full screen. However, this should be optional.
- If you give me the option to keep Media Center open full-screen while navigating in another window on another screen (i.e. Winamp behavior), you can effectively merge the UIs of Media Center and Media Player. Having the two of them is redundant and unintuitive.