I use Windows XP at work (not by choice) and I've been continually saying "no" when it tried to install SP3. Why? No tangible reason other than that decades of experience with Windows has shown me that any time you touch any system files or settings in Windows, crap breaks. When it comes to Windows, you set things up and then like a teetering house of playing cards, you back away slowly and try not to breathe.

Which brings us to the other day. I first noticed something was up when a got a popup dialog on my work machine asking me every 15 minutes whether I wanted to Reboot Now or Reboot Later. Confused, I clicked "later" but again and again and again this prompt appeared. After hours of this interrupting my futile attempts at work I relented; I laboriously shut down my half-dozen command prompts and carefully-placed Vim sessions and various server daemons and all the tools I got to look forward to re-opening after Yet Another Unnecessary Reboot, and then I rebooted.

So then XP left me alone and all was well with the world. Ha, just kidding, it started doing the same thing again almost immediately. Reboot Now or Reboot Later? I hatefully tolerated this for as long as I could but it was a futile battle. Microsoft won in the end and I rebooted again.

A few other people at work reported the same thing on their systems, so I thought maybe it was a virus, but I checked a few things and noticed a shiny new SP3 installed on my system (so my initial guess was close). Somehow SP3 was forced onto my machine, not sure if it was the sysadmins pushing it out or Microsoft's doing, but either way: why was it possible to install a Service Pack on my machine without my even being aware it happened? I do not consider this a good thing.

In any case, after the second reboot, strange things happened. My taskbar settings were all reverted to defaults and I noticed my Address Bar was missing. The Address Bar is a little URL/file path bar in the taskbar where you can type a file path and open an Explorer window quickly. One of the very few semi-useful bits of the XP interface.

But it was gone. What happened? A short Google later and I learned that Microsoft removed the feature in SP3 permanently, by design. Why? Because of anti-monopoly regulatory concerns.

Wow. So it turns out I wasn't disappointed, and a few dozen cards toppled from the shaky tower as I watched, helpless. Not the end of the world, but what an annoyance.

The reason I bothered blogging this is because, hilariously enough, you can still add the Address Bar back in SP3. As I read somewhere or other, probably here, you simply 1) Drag a "My Computer" icon to the top of the screen to make a useless "My Computer" toolbar, 2) Right click that and add the Address Bar, which is still an option there, 3) Drag that Address Bar to your main taskbar, 4) Remove the useless toolbar from above. And then you have your Address Bar back. Oops!

So, in summary:

1. Two forced reboots via 20 repeated un-ignorable popup prompts.
2. Service Pack installed without my knowledge or consent.
3. Useful piece of functionality removed.
4. Item 3 caused by a history of monopolistic business practices and the resulting legal fallout.
5. Functionality in question removed so incompetently that it can be added back anyways in a matter of seconds.
6. Another hour of my life sucked into the black hole of the Microsoft Windows User Experience?, forever lost.

I installed Internet Explorer 8 today. I need it to test the websites at work. I couldn't care less if my personal sites render properly in IE at this point, but I must accommodate people at work.

I should mention right off the bat that given the way Microsoft takes a dump all over web standards and the hours and hours of grief as a web developer trying to get sites to look proper in IE6, unless IE8 crapped gold nuggets every time I clicked a link I don't think I'd like it.

Installing

I wasn't disappointed. IE8 is hate-worthy. A steaming pile of offal. First there was the joy of trying to install it.

Why does installing a web browser require checking my computer for "malicious software"? Why can't I opt out of this? In any case I didn't have to worry about it, because the first time I tried the install, it bombed before it got that far, and demanded that I go to the Windows Update site and install some patch for IE7 before I could continue. Note: I don't have IE7 on my computer. This is a work machine that I kept IE6 on for testing our company websites. This blew my mind.

So I tried to download this patch for IE7, but I couldn't, because I had to get Windows Genuine disAdvantage first. Rage filled me at this point to the point of overflowing. If it was my home computer I'd have stopped right there. But I need this garbage for work, so I held my nose and did it.

Of course the patch required a reboot. Reboot #1.

Now I was able to continue with the install. A slow, plodding download; I think it took 5-10 minutes to do its thing, but it's hard to tell. There was no progress bar to show me how far along it was, nothing to tell me the elapsed time, no indication how large the files were that were being fetched. There is something resembling a progress bar, but it doesn't actually show you much in the way of "progress". Instead a little green thing bounces around like the car from Knight Rider. How much cocaine do you need to imbibe to invent a GUI like this?

Of course IE8 itself required a reboot. Reboot #2.

Why? Installing Firefox and Opera don't require reboots. They download as self-contained .exe installer files. I run them and software appears. This is 2009, for the love of God. Maybe in 20 more years Microsoft will finally manage to re-invent emerge or apt.

The IE8 install, including patching and reboots, took me 45 minutes. If I had to do this on more than one machine, I'd probably jump out the window. How much time have you sucked out of my life, Microsoft? To compare, I decided to install Opera. Opera took less than one minute to download AND install and didn't require a reboot.

Features

When you first open it up, it sends you through a wizard and asks you if you want to enable a bunch of crap. I said no to everything. What the hell is an "Accelerator"? I assumed it was something that tried to make web pages load faster, like the download accelerator scams you used to get popups for all the time in 2001. So I said no.

Turns out "Accelerators" are plugins. Why didn't they call them Plugins? Did some marketroid decide "plugin" wasn't EXTREME enough, so decided to make up their own word? Why do I have to relearn the English language every time someone releases new software? Not Invented Here syndrome?

Windows tried to default me to Live Search, but I give it credit for being upfront in allowing me to turn that crap off and use Google. (No doubt thanks to US anti-trust court proceedings.) 473 wizard dialogs later I had a browser.

The next thing I noticed is more lame attempts to push more Microsoft services at me. In the URL bar every time you type anything, you see this:

Awesome. Is there any way to remove this spamvertisement other than installing Windows Search? If I planned to use IE8, which I don't, I imagine I'd inevitably click that by accident, which is probably the whole idea.

IE8 also added a bunch of useless garbage to my bookmarks toolbar which I insta-deleted. Or tried to. My favorite feature of IE8 by far is this one:

Apparently deleting things from the bookmarks toolbar is just too much for a modern 4-core CPU to handle. Congrats Microsoft. Hang, crash, boom.

There is no menu in IE8 by default. No wait, there is a menu. It's just in the wrong place (lower right side of the top browser area), and instead of readable text it's mostly unlabeled buttons with tiny arrows next to it.

It's like a traditional menu and a fun mystery novel combined! What is in the dropdown next to the house? I'm sure it's a fun surprise.

And actually you can get the old menu to appear too, if you press Alt. Insanity. But it doesn't appear at the top, it appears under the URL bar. One of the few arguably good things about Windows is that programs have consistent GUI parts and work the same way: they have a menu at the top, it's always in the same one place, there's a File and an Edit, and it's predictable. Thanks Microsoft for getting even that wrong.

When I highlight text on a web page, a little blue thing appears that I think I'm supposed to click on. The icon is a bunch of lines and squiggles and an arrow or something. There's no indication what that thing actually does. I clicked it out of curiosity and get a menu full of a bunch of random options like "Search for this". I think this is where ACCELERATORS are supposed to pop up, or something, who cares?

Fonts in IE8 look fuzzy. As a bonus, after installing IE8, fonts in a bunch of other programs (Outlook) are fuzzy now too. Hurrah! IE8, like its predecessors, apparently extends its tendrils into every nook and cranny of your system, corrupting and perverting as it goes. Maybe that's why it needed to reboot my computer twice to install it.

IE8 comes with a Firebug ripoff, which is better than View Source invoking Notepad, but took a full 2 minutes to load when I tried to open it the first time.

IE8 does render my blog properly, which is good. IE7 does too, I think, I only tested it once. I'm not losing sleep over it. Thank you Firefox and Opera: if you didn't exist and put the pressure on, we'd all still be using IE6 and I'd still be writing all my web pages twice to make sure they work in Internet Excrementplorer. As much as I detest IE, if people migrate to IE8 from the shard of utmost evil that is IE6, I'll be happy.

It took me a while to think of a good word to describe Vista in the title for this post. I went with offal because "the parts of a butchered animal removed in dressing; viscera; refuse; rubbish; garbage" at least approximates the smell of Vista somewhat accurately.

How can Microsoft so consistently make such garbage-quality software? It's not like I'm looking for things to hate. I really wanted Vista to be sort of good. Heck, I had to buy a copy of Vista for work, and I don't like thinking that I wasted my money. I'd love to love Vista. (If not for the fact that spending money on Windows helped me get jobs that more than made up for the price of it, I would definitely consider myself to have lost money.)

But no. Here are the things about Vista that annoyed me, JUST TODAY, during the two hours it took me to backup my files in preparation for installing a dual-boot of Ubuntu on it.

• The mouse speed when I use my trackpad in Vista is about 800% slower than when I use a USB mouse. I can't figure out why. This problem does not exist in Ubuntu, where both work fine and at the same speed.
• About once every second, Vista accesses my hard drive. I hear "click"... "click"... "click"... "click"... incessantly forever. I don't know what running process is doing this. I killed everything I could think of. I turned off indexing of my files. I thought it was the Sidebar for a while, but nope. Still it does this. Lo and behold, the laptop doesn't do this in Ubuntu. What the hell is Vista looking for on my hard drive all the time? How much has my HD's lifespan been reduced by this?
• I tried to burn a DVD to back up my files. A popup bubble near the taskbar told me I had files waiting to be burned. It's a good thing too, because the enormous freaking window where I was dragging and dropping files wasn't enough of a reminder. This reminder bubble kept appearing, disappearing, appearing, over and over and over. I don't know why. When I say "disappear", I don't mean instantly disappear. I mean a slow, sluggish, jittery, gratuitous fade-out animation which clearly left Vista out of breath due to the struggle of the demanding computational feat of displaying a 100x200 pixel transparent rounded window.
• Vista failed to burn the DVD, without giving any error message other than that "burning failed". Then it told me to insert a new disc. I did. It made some noises, spit it out, and said "No disk inserted, please insert a disc". I tried 3 blank DVDs and all were rejected. I used Roxio in Vista and it worked OK (on the first DVD I tried to begin with), though Roxio itself is trash and was filled with links to get me to "Upgrade" (probably spend money; I didn't click them). (It's been YEARS since I've had a problem burning a disc in K3B. I'm using Gentoo for God's sake. I compile my own kernels and have to pick my device drivers from big lists of things I don't even remotely recognize. Think of how many things I could've done wrong setting up Gentoo that would prevent my DVD burner from working. I'm practically BEGGING it not to work here, and yet it does.)
• Every time I rebooted, Vista reminded me again that I had files waiting to be burned, until I double clicked the DVD icon in Computer and deleted the ghost-files that appeared there in spite of there being no DVD in the drive. Once the last ghost file was gone, Vista immediately asked me to insert a DVD(????).
• I used Vista's built in sucky Disk Manager to resize my Vista NTFS partition to make room for Ubuntu. It would only let me reduce the size of a 100GB partition by 30GB, even though 80GB were free in that partition. Googling reveals that this is a well-known limitation of the Disk Manager. Because Vista is a well-known piece of feces. I am actually one of the lucky ones, apparently. For many people, Vista just flat out refuses to resize a partition at all, regardless of how much space is free. If not for the fact that Ubuntu only takes 2.5GB fully-installed (including my boot partition, OpenOffice, Firefox, Gimp, and TONS of needless packages Ubuntu provides by default) I might be in trouble.
• While trying to make a backup of my files, I noticed that one of my folders had a random empty My Music subfolder in it. This folder didn't appear when I looked in Explorer, but it appeared magically in certain other file selection dialogs. Apparently my laptop is haunted by evil spirit folders, attracted by the pure evil that Vista radiates in all directions.
• I tried deleting a folder full of music files. As always, this stretched out into a 10-minute operation. Eventually, Vista dramatically warned me about deleting desktop.ini because, as we all know, it's VITAL to the workings of my system. I told it to delete it. Then it warned me that some of my folders were too big to fit in the recycle bin and would have to be deleted immediately instead. Gasp. I told it OK. Then it told me that one of my music folders was shared, and deleting it would stop it from being shared. You don't say! How this folder became shared, I do not know; never have I accessed this folder from another computer. I told it to go ahead and delete it. Then it repeated this warning about sharing, for the next folder. And then again, FOR EVERY SINGLE FOLDER I WAS DELETING, one by one. This is all with User Account Control DISABLED. If I had it enabled I'd be sitting there clicking OK in prompt after prompt until tomorrow morning. Eventually I went to DOS and tried rmdir /s /q *. This didn't work, I believe because it couldn't find a folder called "*". So I had to rmdir /s /q each directory manually. Thankfully Vista's tab-completion is gimped enough to make even that more difficult than it should ever be.
• All the while, I experienced random lag and slowness and horrible pain. This is such a standard problem in Vista that it's almost possible to forget that the lag exists, until you boot into Linux and see how stupidly fast your computer runs in comparison.

My coworkers report that some people at work who got new laptops and requested Vista are having such problems that the laptops are almost unusable. Apparently 1GB of RAM isn't enough. If my computer is any testament, neither is 2GB.

When I got into Ubuntu for the first time, I immediately noticed that the latpop FLIES. Which is to be expected with a fairly new Core 2 Duo machine with a fairly nice video card etc. etc. Amazing. I even put big fat bloated Compiz on here running on top of big fat bloated Gnome, with all kinds of ridiculous desktop apps and file-indexers and God only knows what else Ubuntu is throwing at me, and it still runs perfectly. Only thing that didn't work out of the box was my wireless card, which took me 15 minutes of googling to find an easy solution for. (For googlers: Dell Vostro 1500 is my laptop. Ubuntu works on it perfectly well.)

In three years when Microsoft releases their next stinker OS, I'm probably going to be forced to buy that one too. The joys of a world where everyone uses Microschloft Office.