The 20 Worst Windows Features of All Time

PC World Magazine ^ | 6-26-2007? | PC World Editors

[Turbopilot]

Introduction

In November of 1985, Microsoft released Windows 1.0. And thus began Windows' 22-year reign (to date) as the world's most popular, most irritating computing platform. Which Windows features have been responsible for the most angst? We tallied this list of offenders with the advice of PC World editors and contributors as well as members of the PCW community. Our roster includes several kinds of worsts: Just plain bad ideas, good ideas gone awry, and a few ideas that started out terrible but eventually became surprisingly decent. Click on the images above to see 'em all, starting with number 20.

[Turbopilot]

Funny, and about 75% correct.

[Turbopilot]

Tech ping?

[ShadowAce]

[grellis]

Stay away from jalousie windows. They're a pain in the ass to clean and leak air like crazy. They are so inefficient, Al Gore prolly uses them.

Oh, wait...nevermind

[Ocracoke Island]

8. End Task
A program hangs. You type...

So true. In Linux, you can use a GUI to force quit. If you prefer the command line, you simply find the process ID# with ps -aux and then kill [PID#] it. Always works.

[Clara Lou]

It’s nice to know that other people have the same grumbles. I have a dual boot—XP and Kubuntu. I didn’t think it would happen, but I never boot to XP anymore.

[antiRepublicrat]

They forgot personalized menus, one of the worst user interface ideas ever in Microsoft products.

[Still Thinking]

Oh, God, I HATE those. And even worse than the style that hides the ones you don’t use very much is the style that reorders the ones remaining, meaning you have to find what you want anew almost every time you open a menu. Real bright.

[Kevmo]

B4L8R

[coloradan]

Booting. Fix that one, and the others go away.

[relictele]

Windows almost inspires difficult philsophical questions at times:

If I answer Yes To All why do I need to answer Yes To All a second time?

[Still Thinking]

You probably clicked on Yes to Almost All.

[Still Thinking]

I also think somebody for MuSoft used to work for Zogby or someone writing surveys with biased lists of choices. Like when you install some new hardware, the choices for access the internet are Yes, No, and Always. Why is there no Never if there's an Always? It's like they're willing to make implementing your choice easier IF it's a choice they agree with.

Also the security center isn't adequately aware of non-MS security products and will insist you aren't adequately protected when you are. No problem, except it insists on "alerting" you to this incessantly. If you're going to be [very] assertive, it might be good to know what you're talking about. You have to turn off a service to make it go away. Same thing with a laptop I have. It has a USB 1.1 port and EVERY time I plugged in a memory stick, it "informs" me the port could run faster if I upgraded to 2.0. It's a freakin laptop with a built in port, which XP could have figured out for itself if it really wanted to make my life convenient! Just shut the heck up.

[Publius6961]

BUMP!

[Still Thinking]

Nice tagline.

[Still Thinking]

Exactly. And what was the point anyway? I can leave a browser window open set to auto-refresh every minute or something.

[Turbopilot]

Is that the thing in Office where the menus hide most of their options by default, unless you click the little down arrow to display everything?

If so, I agree with you - it’s the first thing I turn off when I install any Office product. But AFAIK nothing in Windows itself uses such menus, does it?

[Turbopilot]

I'm not sure which version of Windows the author of this piece meant (the article is kind of a historical review of all Windows versions), but in XP you have the same two options. Ctrl+Shift+Esc to kill a process from the Task Manager, or taskkill /pid #### from the command line.

Sometimes there is a bit of a lag between when you kill a process in Task Manager and when it ceases to run (never from the command line, though). But it always works.