Micro$oft Mystries

But learning to ride a bike is hard, and even after we've learned, it's a dicey business fraught with potholes, dogs, cars, and even mere inattention, any of which can cause a loss of balance. Wouldn't it seem to be easier to stick with tricycles? Sure, a few tricycles are made for adults, but for most of us a two-wheeled bicycle is enough better, faster, and smaller that it's worth the learning curve.

Douglas Englebart; Adam Engst paraphrasing

Learning to use a 400-ton bicycle that tries to make breakfast and correct grammatical errors you make at a cocktail party can be a pain, though, sometimes, on the other hand.

deleting files:

Shift-delete on a file once asks if it should really go in Recycle Bin; say no & repeat, and you are asked if it really should be deleted (which it is supposed to do, i.e. as opposed to copying it to the Bin).

help

clicking on the letter buttons in the NT commands index (which isn't particularly easy to find anyway) does not jump you anywhere.

selecting files

the little selector pulldown at the top of the save/open file dialog -- why does it take so frigging long to pull down the first time? (i've seen on other people's machines that it can be instantaneous, but other other people have the same problem)

creating dir

why does creating a new directory from within the Save As dialog take so long? why does it take even longer if i doubleclick the new folder instead pressing return after typing in the new name?

deleting

why, when i select 203 files to be deleted, and one of them cannot be, for some reason, do none of them get deleted? or worse, in some arbirary ordering, all subsequent files do not get deleted? or, perhaps, some get deleted and some don't? or what the fuck?

temp files

why does word sometimes produce 203 temporary copies of one and the same file, that then turn out to be not-so-temporary?

MS Word settings

why does set language in Word/tools accept my changes, but ignore them?

devices

why does it take fully 30 seconds for the windows explorer to realize there is no floppy drive attached?

MS Word settings

why would Word have a different keyboard layout than the rest of the system? i did change the default language, but did i ask for a different layout? do they think i switch keyboards between applications?

MS Outlook archiving

i told MS Outlook to archive my stuff to special file -- why dos it still write to the default file somewhere else?

control

why does outlook have to interrupt EVERYTHING when it feels like doing its "periodic archive"?

copying

if i am copying an entire directory tree, and it fails in the middle somewhere for whatever reason, the process just stops. cool. which has he copied aleady? which do i still need to copy? thanks!

moving

behavior during move of a read-only dir is simply non-deterministic. the number of quirks and wierdnesses is too large to list.

explorer

why, when you are looking at a dir sorted by date, does a file you just modified jump to the bottom (where the oldest files are supposed to live)?

outlook

if you have a recurring appointment, change an individual occurrence and then change the recurring appointment, the individual changes are silently, irrevocably lost. this, to put it mildly, sucks.

outlook

why do reminders for appointments often come after the fact? (not always, ocourse -- that would be consistent, ew)

outlook

when i get to say when the reminder is to be repeated, why is there nothing between 8 hours and 1 day? why can't i enter what i want?

excel

why cant it copy more than 255 chars per cell when copying a worksheet? does the code harken back to 1967? this may seem to be an obscure gripe, but if you ever find you need to do this, it really, truly, sucks. big. time.

word

even though i turned off auto-spellcheck, i am unable to type STPO because he insists i want to type STOP

word

after i save a file to diskette, and close the file, why does Word query the diskette drive every 5 seconds, forever, until i quit Word?

explorer (& elsewhere)

in the various panes, dir tree, files, etc., why does page down scroll to the bottom of the already-visible screen, instead of actually, you know, doing a page down?

explorer

"this .. cannot be deleted. there has been a sharing violation" great -- but by whom? where? when? what program? how can i solve the problem? clues? please.

clock

Why does changing the time zone sometimes change the clock (actually quite reasonable), and sometimes not? Why do some open ms apps notice, and others not?

"help"

When a help file tells you how to do something, it says "Click here to start xxx." Why doesnt it tell me how to start it myself?

emergency repair disk

this is a classic: after churning about for about ten minutes, the emergency repair disk utility tells me it can't fit the stuff onto the diskette. that's it. sorry. goodbye. deal with it.

explorer

The shortcut in my 'Start' menu resolves to '%SystemRoot%explorer.exe'.

But when i type that at a cmd prompt, i don't get the explorer; i get that castrated thing w/o the file tree pane on the left.

Do i need platinum MSDN membership to understand this?

NT / Network dailup? / ?

Every once in a while i start a program and this dail-up prompt pops up asking whether it should connect to some server that i havn't been connected to in months.

Why does an application that is starting up grab control & and push its windows to the forefront of everything?

Why do MS apps pop up dialogues -- such as the truly uninteresting MS Outlook 'Shall i archive right now?' -- right in my face, no matter what i am doing?

This is called multitasking?

Why is there no way to cancel an OS operation in progress, such as the starting up of an app you clicked by accident, that inevitably takes about 70 secs of your precious time?

Outlook

How can it be that the rest of the world agrees on the modus for attaching files to email messages, but MS silently and irrevocably decides to do it differently?

All attachement i am getting from Heping ("200002Ericsson")

When trying to 'Open with ..' Excel (shift-rightclick) a file deep inside Program Files .., the path gets split between Program and Files & Excel ends up trying to open 2 non-existant files.

Suddenly, some of my fonts looks scruffy, but anti-aliased. Netscape, Opera, Eudora -- why? O, i'm sure it's all my fault, but what did i do? please?

[twas gone after 2 (!) reboots.]

Outlook Tuesday, December 05, 2000 at 6:45:14 AM

You know, i often forget to launch Outlook because of its ridiculous memory requirements (compare to about 2K that crontab needs) -- but the really nice thing is that when i do remember, Outlook forgets to remind me about my appointments.

NT Sunday, December 10, 2000 at 7:09:15 AM

RAM: working with the task manager and FreeMem http://www.meikel.com (and watching things die, and live, arbitrarily), ah have ascertained that the task manager is lying about the amount of free memory. i'm shocked, truly shocked. What is sense does an OS utility make that lies?

NT Sunday, December 10, 2000 at 7:11:00 AM

Why is it that when i start up, i am using about 80 Megs of RAM, but when i work for a couple of hours, close all applications and check again, it's 174MB? Tell me this in writing from Redmond: there is a memory leak in some core function of the OS?

NT Sunday, December 10, 2000 at 7:17:59 AM

How den fick does one start a windows explorer from the command line, or a batch file, that already has the View settings i want, and has the fiel tree pane thing on the left? Why does the provided shortcut, Windows NT Explorer, work, but break when i copy it and add some args?

explorer/NT Wednesday, January 02, 2002

In explorer, i tell the system to always open xml files with IEplore (shift-rightclick on file; Open With ..); they get opened in Opera (because opera is my default browser?)

IE Thursday, January 03, 2002 at 1:41:57 PM

Buried deep insided the "advanced" "internet options" is this gem: Show friendly HTTP error messages

friendly == a lot of formulaic text that completely obfuscates what may have gone wrong.