In every other job I have had, I have had some way to get my work done without using Windows. So I have missed out on the joys of 8 hour a day exposure to Win95/98/NT/2000/xp.
Those days ended this week when I took command some of a box fully loaded with WIN2000.
I got tired of stumbling around as guest on my own desktop so I asked the IT lads to fix that. Then the machine was brutally slow — the systray stuff took forever to show up — so I made another call for help. The proposed fix was to “clean it up.”
I came in the next day and the box was frozen. Had to powercycle it. It’s a little better but still seems to bog down on login.
I installed Mozilla instead of dealing with Outlook, though it surprises me how many people use Pine (granted it comes from the UW so it’s well understood, but hardly flashy). I may drop back to that just to preserve screen real estate.
I then cranked up the display to a healthy 1024 * 832 or so: 800 * 600 on a 17 inch display makes me feel aged, like I’m reading a L A R G E P R I N T book.
One thing I found interesting: you can’t quit an Office application. You can only close it. The difference is more than semantic, of course. It was made obvious by the Mozilla installer: it asked me if I wanted to keep it loaded in a quickload mode, with some of its guts in RAM, just like the Leading Brand does. Hmmmm . . . .
I’m struck by how little has changed since my scattered impressions of WIN3.1, in many cases. An application lives in a little box or “window” and the documents open inside that, rather than as windows themselves, so you have two sets of window management widgets to look at, and two windows to deal with. You seemingly can’t overlay two documents from different apps, since the application window is behind the foremost one and is of course larger than the the document window you’re working with.
Folders all open in pretty useless display modes, so I make them how I want them (lists with details), put them away and re-open them to find my wishes are ignored. There may be some master control somewhere to make all windows look the way I want, but why can’t each window remember what I told it? [See MacOS, circa 1984].
I wanted to print a two-page document on a single sheet: I’m cheap that way. Why isn’t that an option? It looked like the “fit to page” option would do it, but no love.
It’s really pretty unsatisfying and you *have* to use the Windows environment: DOS has not improved in any meaningful way since 1995 or so. Moving files around or doing anything with is far too painful. Of course, I do most of my file management in OS X with Terminal: I rarely use the Finder. I even open documents on the command line (“open FileMaker docs/assets”).
It seems to me a lot of people have been working an awful long time on this: how come this this is the best they could come up with?
I have a feeling this won’t be the last entry on this topic, so a new category — “I don’t do Windows” — was needed.