Vista Annoyances

In particular things that are worse in Vista than XP

Some Vista annoyances have workarounds, and the idea is to collect and disseminate such workarounds. Others have no workarounds, and the idea is to see if anyone knows of workarounds or to politely suggest to the appropriate people that the problems need to be fixed.

Annoyances with workarounds:

• Folder settings get changed: Folder settings sometimes change spontaneously in Windows XP, but the problem is a lot worse with Vista.  Folders suddenly become media folders, displaying columns for rating songs instead of typical properties such as size and date.  By making chages to the registry this problem can be fixed; follow the instructions in this post, copying the code between the dotted lines and pasting it into a file called somename.reg, then double clicking the file to make the changes.
• Zip files slow down the system hugely:  When you insert a USB flash drive with a large zip file into a Windows computer, the system will take a very long time to look into the zip file.  With a slow computer and a big zip file, your flash drive can be marooned for over half an hour before you get clearance to remove it safely.  If this happens with a docked computer, your computer can be marooned in the dock, which largely defeats the usefulness of a dock.  The workaround is to turn off Windows' prying into zip files, as detailed at Annoyances.org.  Although this problem was present in Windows XP, the switch in Vista to saving many smaller files in programs such as Windows Mail makes this problem much worse than it was on Windows XP.
• Help files for XP no longer work: To fix this, install the relevant program from Microsoft.
• Move to Folder and Copy to Folder right-click options gone: Restore this feature that was in Windows XP using the two registry files here.
• Devices in the Sound Control Panel disappear :  You can restore these in either the Playback or Recording tab by right-clicking and choosing "Show disabled devices".  Without knowing this right-click option the devices appear to be unrecoverable.
• Windows Mail crashes:  Windows Mail would crash sometimes when antivirus programs scanned large messages.  This was apparently fixed with an update released on 24 June 2008 (KB952709).
• User Access Control:  Some people defend UAC as a good security measure, but UAC is implemented in a way that is far more annoying than similar security on a Macintosh, reportedly made annoying purposely.  UAC prompts come up so often that the average user clicks them mindlessly.  The responsibility may lie with writers of individual applications that haven't taken UAC into account, but Microsoft should make its security environment as unobtrusive as its counterpart on the Macintosh.  The workarounds are for users to turn off UAC, move to the Macintosh, or stick with Windows XP.

Annoyances with no known workarounds

• Windows Contacts is amazingly slow: Sorting contacts by last name can take well over a minute, even with a moderate number of contacts like ~1000.  One workaround is accepting the default sorting by file name (effectively first name), which doesn't introduce delays, and just doing a text search to find a particular contact.  But Contacts slows down other programs too; typing a name into the "To" field of a message in Windows Mail results in a delay as some type of amazingly slow search is done through the contacts.  Also, searching Contacts is poorly thought out: search Contacts for your last name, and every single contact appears in the search results, presumably due to some tagging of all records with your last name.  (Oddly but usefully, if you search for your name spelled backwards you get only that name).
• Management of external displays and printers is terrible:  Even major peripherals from large companies work terribly with Vista, including many Intel graphics chips and Hewlett Packard printers.  People argue about whether the problem is due to companies like Intel or HP caring only about selling newer hardware or due to Microsoft mismanaging the driver process, but the result is that many people are unwilling to upgrade to Vista because they've heard harrowing accounts of network printers that go unrecognized periodically or computers that no longer recognize docking as a signal to drive an external monitor in its proper resolution. 
• Hot-swapping batteries: Most computers allow swapping batteries, and the most enlightened allow "hot-swapping" while the computer is in Sleep.  This worked fine under XP, but something about upgrades to Vista can stop this from working, requiring the user to shut down the computer when the battery gets low.  As with other problems it is unclear whether the problem is in the operating system, the BIOS or elsewhere, but the response of users to such quality degradations with Vista is is to avoid Vista upgrades.
• No way to report bugs or suggestions:  In the old days there were multiple ways to report bugs to Microsoft, and Microsoft took the repots so seriously that I wondered whether they thought I was the Seattle radio talk show host with a similar name or knew that I'd gone to college with some of the founders.  At times Microsoft even made changes without hours of getting suggestions.  In recent years that has changed, and even the "Microsoft Wish" program for reporting bugs and suggesting improvements is gone.  Microsoft has an "MVP" system of empowered community experts, but even MVPs bemoan the fact that they don't have good ways to report bugs or make suggestions, and even people at Microsoft are frustrated at the problems.  The lack of mechanisms to report problems is an important reason that Vista annoyances persist.

Copyright © 05 July 2008 Mickey Segal.  If you have more workarounds, new annoyances and corrections. please let us know.  Thanks to Carsten for suggestions.  See also Browser Annoyances and Windows Live Mail Undermines Mobile Computing.