Thursday, May 24, 2007

More Microsoft aggravations

Okay, I just have to rant and rail about Microsoft again. I've been trying to send a document via e-mail, which requires navigating to its location to load it. Once again, Windows XP slows down to an agonizing crawl. And why? Because it insists on doing so much stupidity in the background -- unnecessary operations that Microsoft feels would be "kewl." Nevermind that it sacrifices performance greatly.

The same thing often happens when you attempt to right-click on a file or a folder. In principle, there's no reason why the right-click menu should not pop up right away; however, XP uses this opportunity to say "Oooh! Oooh! There's a whole bunch of other kewl stuff I can do at this point! Let's squeeze that in!"

To some extent, this depends on the various software options and handlers that have been added to the system. This is one reason why a fresh XP installation will perform better than a three-year-old one. It's ultimately no excuse, though; calling up a right-click menu is such a simple operation that it shouldn't require massive amounts of computing time. The same holds true for calling up Windows Explorer. Microsoft simply made a whole bunch of foolish design calls in their efforts to make things look nifty.

And it's bloody aggravating.