Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Why does the Control Panel mock me?

I just opened up the Control Panel on my Vista x64 machine and just felt very annoyed. Why? Because it looked like this:
What's wrong here?
  1. Half of the applets did not load correctly... I have complained about this before but it doesn't hurt to complain again. A refresh sorts this out. It may be some kind of time-out loading applets.
  2. For some reason Vista has arbitrarily decided to change the current view to large icons. It likes arbitrarily changing the views of folders you see. This is incredibly annoying.
I saw this the other day. I didn't read all of it, but just by looking at some of the pictures it looks like much of the stuff I've noticed. Let's hope things are better if not in SP2, then Windows 7....

PS: Another annoyance is when you try to execute a large downloaded file (or something like that, there may be other factors involved). Nothing happens for several minutes whilst it verifies a digital signature or whatever. You'd think they'd know better and show some kind of progress dialog. Even worse, it can leave you wondering if the double click registered so you may double click again. Now try doing that over a network..

3 comments:

Unknown said...

This cracked me the eff up.
I feel your pain, man. I noticed the same issues with Vista the night I bought my new PC and set it up/transferred daily-use data from another HDD.

Unknown said...

Hi, Its my first time reading your blog and it's very enlightening, I must say I'm amused. In fact it's the first time I've really bothered reading someones blog thorougly, and I'm not regretting it.
For this issue, I suspect that this has to do with some verification of privileges of sorts, or perhaps a scanning of a sort.

The main thing is that this only occurs when you have UAC enabled. I haven't tested if they have fixed this in windows 7, or if it makes a difference whether "Dim Desktop" is enabled or not.
Cheers, keep up the enjoyable messages, I like your insight.

DisplayNameHere said...

@nathalas: Hehe thanks, haven't had too much to write about as of late for some reason though :/

As far as this problem goes, fortunately I haven't seen it again since I did a clean install of Windows Vista.

Some time ago I did see a slightly different variation when all the names temporarily had 'garbage' labels (i.e. random characters) though I didn't manage to get a screenshot of that one as they went away when it finished loading.