I have no idea what Vista is trying to tell me here. Am I just being daft?

I totally expected it to go down like this:

“Follow these steps to solve the problem with Windows Vista”
Step 1: Reformat
Step 2: Install Windows XP
Step 3: Done!

I am soooooo close to taking this guy’s advice…

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/cio/helpdesksamurai/archives/i-warned-ye-18790

Rage

I’m going to take a bit of a risk this week and talk about something that may not be experienced by a large number of users. Those who do experience these issues however will understand my pain. I’m talking about the piss poor networking support in Windows Vista.

First let’s talk about drivers.  Now this can’t be blamed completely on Microsoft, but they still contribute to the glorious “Vista experience”.  Ever since I upgraded to Vista, I’ve had driver issues with my wireless card.  First it simply would fail when transferring large files or after a long period of use.  The only fix was to reboot.  Next I upgraded to a newer driver.  For the first hour everything was working great.  But then everything went to hell and I couldn’t go more than 5 minutes before the drivers failed resulting in another reboot to fix.  At this point, I couldn’t even stay online long enough to research the issue.  Finally I was able to “upgrade” to XP drivers - no problems ever since.

Explain to me how XP drivers work better on Vista than Vista drivers.

Next, let’s talk about how “integrated” networking is with Windows Explorer.  I’ve got some weird networking and DNS issues in my home network.  As a result, sometimes there is a delay connecting to other PCs while the names resolve.  As a result, every time I open Windows Explorer, or a Save dialog, I have to wait a full 15 SECONDS!  This is not an exaggeration.  For some reason, Explorer or even a damn save dialog can’t open until some timeout occurs.  Now I know, I should probably figure out why my network is funky, but in my opinion this is just shoddy programming on Microsoft’s part.  Ever hear of multi-threading??  I don’t even have any mapped drives or network places.

One more lovely “quirk” (ha ha isn’t it charming) of Vista is that every time I resume from standby, Vista takes about 1 full minute to re-connect to my wireless network.  I really like sitting there waiting before I can browse the web - it gives me some time to collect my thoughts and decide what I want to do.  Thank you Vista for giving me hours a week to just sit and think.

Rage

I cannot begin to tell you how excited I was to find this hack/fix for my Vista explorer views issues. Check out the first part of this article: Explorer Views: You’re clueless! (Part 1). I still have no clue what made my default folder views go into chaos. But I sincerely hope Microsoft fixes this problem.

Here are the steps I took to resolve my issue…

<Warning, registry edit ahead>

The first step is to clear out all your existing views, they are dirty, dirty views.
Navigate to: “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell”
Delete key: “BagMRU”
Delete key: “Bags”

Next, let’s recreate those keys.
Recreate key: “BagMRU”
Recreate key: “Bags”

Now, we are going to create a new key so Vista will ignore automatic folder type discovery.
Navigate to: “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags”
Create key: “AllFolders”

Navigate to: “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags\AllFolders”
Create key: “Shell”

Navigate to: “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags\AllFolders\Shell”
Create string value: Name: “FolderType” Value: “NotSpecified”

You should see this in regedit when you’re done:

</Warning, registry edit ahead>

So, that’s it… You’re views will be set back to their default state and now Vista will no longer try to auto detect folder types.

Thanks to brink for this post at vistax64.com.

I thought I would share this comic from J.D. at UserFriendly.org. It made me giggle more than it should have.

[UserFriendly.org Comic]

Betrayal

A powerful Jedi once said, “These are not the VPN connections you are looking for”. Ok, you’re right, no Jedi ever said that. But that’s what Vista says it to me everytime I open my “Connect To” window or when I try to “Set up a connection or network“.

Connect to a network:
This problem only really comes around when you have a wireless network card and you have VPN connections defined. This scenario probably holds true for most working professionals who own a laptop.

*NOTE* Almost all of our articles are based on productivity and apply to all you folks who use your computers for work. If you do nothing but play games and browse the Internet with your computer, these articles probably will not apply.

GlenC - yeah, here come the comments - “WTF is your problem dude! Who uses VPN connections??? Do you need those for WOW?”

When you open up the “Connect To” dialog the list automatically scrolls down to the “Wireless Network Connection” section. Why? I don’t really know. Who decided that wireless connections where more important than VPN connections? In my opinion, this window layout is pretty amateur. Two tabs containing wireless and VPN connections would have worked a lot better.

GlenC - especially if you consider what the real world use case probably is. Windows will remember my wireless connections and connect automatically. So how often are you actually going to have to set up a new wireless connection? VPN on the other hand you may be connecting and disconnectiong every day - or multiple times a day. I believe the designers of Vista were thinking about the first time setup use cases vs. the long term day to day operations. Initially you’d be impressed - “hey, look, on my new PC it automatically scrolls to wireless connections which is EXACTLY what I am doing right now!!! OMG VISTA IS SWEET!”. Eventually though, it gets annoying. “okay Vista, I’m already connected to a wireless network. I know WiFi is all hot and trendy now, but I already have it man. Can I please see the boring old VPN connections??”

Set up a connection or network:
So now… When you need to create a new VPN connection you need to click on the “Set up a connection or network” hyperlink. You are then presented with another window. Again, if you don’t have a wireless network card, you won’t see as many items as there are displayed in this screenshot.

As you can see… “Connect to a workplace” is the last item on the list. Why? I don’t really know. This list isn’t even sorted alphabetically. If it where, “Connect to a workplace” would be first in the list.

GlenC - this one just drives me crazy. Who decided that creating a dial up connection was more important than VPN??? And I’m running Vista BUSINESS edition too!!! The irony is that anybody still using dial up isn’t exactly on the cutting edge and they won’t have new hardware capable of running goddamn vista in the first f-ing place!!

Confusion

Make two paper airplanes and try to get them to fly to the same spot twice. That’s how consistent many Windows Vista features seem to be. Did Microsoft employ any user experience experts? Did anyone listen to them? Does anyone care?

It seems to me that I spend a lot of time complaining about Vista’s consistency. This topic surrounds the inconsistent user experiences that can be found in Vista. I think the best way to go about this topic would be to forgo all the chit chat and just show you.

In this shot, I am showing three different sections from within Vista. In some spots there are icons to the left of the task list items. In other areas, they are either incomplete, or totally missing.
Here we can see how some elements seem to be just thrown in. Is this a webpage or what? Why are there so many hyperlinks in windows applications? It’s just plain annoying to see hyperlinks right along side standard buttons.
Now, this window just threw me for a loop the first time I saw it. How many different elements do we need to throw onto one window? I think this window needs more cowbell.

Confusion

A lot of the new features and changes in Vista seem to be focused on making things more user friendly. Well, this new feature tries to be more aesthetically pleasing while giving you less options. I have a hard time understanding why I cannot have both. If something is not worth doing right, don’t do it at all.

Anyhow, enough of my ramblings…

Sometimes when I initiate a system shutdown, a wonderful fullscreen black transparent screen pops up. The screen politely declares that “The following programs are still running”. Unfortunately, the only option you get is to “Shut down now” or “Cancel”. This is great… now I have to waste more time. This issue seems to crop up when I have something open that hasn’t been saved or when I have an !EXTREME! *roll eyes* application open that might take awhile to close.

GlenC - yeah. This is soo helpful. This is a classic example of giving you information without actually letting you do anything about it. I mean someone obviously spent time building this new helpful feature. Why couldn’t they just put in a little more effort and let me maybe do something with this information?

I hate to keep comparing things to XP… But, in XP I would normally initiate a shutdown and I would get a prompt for each application that might be taking too long to shutdown. This process might not be perfect but at least it would give me an option to save my work.

GlenC - this is another example of things that normally shouldn’t take that long, but now require more clicks and more waiting. There are sooooo many things that used to be quick but are now agonizingly slow. Just the other day I was sitting - waiting - pondering the fact that with Vista I now have a lot more time to allow my mind to wander…

This really isn’t a huge issue. It’s just a reminder to me how most of the new feature ideas in Vista are not thought out to fruition.

For those of you who might not have seen the new tab at the top… We have gotten a good number of great user submissions, so go check them out!.

Thanks to, Michael McDade, Ted Trujillo, Brett Foster, TeacherJay, and CinnKitty. We can’t wait to hear from the rest of you.

Rage

I really need some help trying to figure out what exactly Vista has done with explorer’s views. Long story short, explorer has gone senile and set certain folder views to inaccurate depictions of it’s previous self.

In previous versions of Windows (XP)… After an install, I would immediately go into action setting explorer settings just the way I liked them. Doing this pretty much locked in these settings for the life of my OS install. Show hidden files and folders, check. Hide extensions for known file types, unckeck. Remember each folder’s view setting, uncheck. Apply to All Folders… go!

Now in Vista, there are all the same settings. Except one important fact. The “Apply to All Folders” description is different in Vista. In XP it’s “You can apply the view (such as Details or Tiles) that you are using for this folder to all folders”. In Vista it’s “You can apply the view (such as Details or Icons) that you are using for this folder to all folders of this type“.

As I dug a little deeper I discovered that there is a property setting for folders that defines what type it is.

So now with that said, why does my explorer think my c:\ folder is a Music folder. As a matter of fact, why the hell are all my folders set to “Pictures and Videos”? Awesome… just awesome. And better yet, didn’t I set my folder options to NOT “Remember each folder’s view settings”? Broken!

GlenC - as bad as this is, what really bothers me is that Vista can’t seem to make up its mind what kind of type a folder is. I’ll have a folder set to Details view, then I come back to that same folder a few minutes later and every icon is 64×64 fucking pixels big! WTF? Why did Vista decide that I needed extra large thumbnails all of a sudden?

This is another one of those big disappointment areas for Vista. There was so much excitement around WinFS and how you could have different types of items stored in regular windows folders. Now we don’t get any of those cool features but instead we have a schizophrenic Explorer that doesn’t know a system folder from a photos folder from a music folder.

This is a bug, plain and simple. I have this problem on multiple Vista computers. If anyone has answers, please feel free to come forward and help me out. I need consistency!