Tag: windows 8

Windows 2000’s user interface was way better than Windows 10

Posted on October 3, 2018March 13, 2020 by Jody Bruchon

This is part of a comment I left on a video about Windows 10. It seems like it should be here as well. It’s been modified for better presentation.

The Windows 2000 user interface was better than all that followed. Some improvements were made in each successive version but Windows 7 was the last one where the few bad UI change decisions could be easily worked around and adjusted to by users. Everything UI went straight to hell after Windows 7. The Charm bar is dead in 10 because it was an extremely poor UI decision from the get-go.

“Tablet Mode” on 10 is worse ON TABLETS than “normal” mode.
The “flat” design scheme with monochromatic ambiguous icons is more difficult for the human eye to scan and recognize.
A lack of borders, shadows, 3D edges, etc. makes UI elements mush together. Low contrast between UI elements greatly exacerbates the flat design issues.
Retracting Modern scrollbars are extremely annoying to use and greatly slow down anyone trying to use such scroll bars.
Removing the 3D appearance and dark borders from normal scrollbars and reducing the contrast between scrollbar buttons and the bar itself have made normal scrollbars much slower to use for experts and nearly impossible for novices.
The schizophrenic Control Panel/Settings dichotomy can only be described as a disaster, with every build of Windows 10 changing the names of categories, adding new ones, making Control Panel items kick over to Settings panels instead of doing what they’re supposed to do, moving settings around with no educational hints as to where the settings have moved to, etc.
There are no hints to educate users about how to use the system, what changes have been made, what features are available.
There is no longer any form of offline help available to learn about the system.
Things that can be clicked often don’t look clickable and vice-versa.
Things that can be dragged now have zero visual indication that they can be dragged; there are no drag handles on the Start menu edges and no border frames on scalable Modern program windows, for example.

Windows 10 is objectively a terrible user interface. People succeed in spite of it, not because of it.

[FIX] Windows reinstall: after installing laptop drivers, I’m stuck at the Windows boot splash forever!

Posted on April 25, 2014 by Jody Bruchon

If you perform a clean install on a laptop (especially of Windows 7), install the drivers for the system, and end up stuck at the Windows boot splash screen forever, you probably have a problem with a badly behaving hard drive shock protection driver.

Toshiba and HP/Compaq in particular seem to have this issue. The hard drive shock protection driver hooks into the system by installing itself as a filter driver on the entire “disk drives” hardware class, and if you don’t install it, you end up with a piece of hardware (usually something ACPI-related like HPQ0004) that whines about needing drivers. Sometimes the drive protection driver doesn’t cause the problem until you install or change your IDE/SATA storage drivers or other motherboard/chipset-related drivers. I have seen the HP shock protection driver only kill a computer after the AMD Catalyst installer for the motherboard hardware was completed and the system rebooted.

If you install a driver on a laptop and then get stuck at a Windows boot splash forever, here is how to fix it!

Turn on the computer hitting/holding F8 to get the Windows Advanced Boot Options menu.
Select “Last Known Good Configuration (advanced)” from the list. This will allow you to boot to Windows again and fix the problem.
Open the Registry Editor (Start -> type “regedit” in the search box and hit Enter). If a UAC prompt appears, allow Registry Editor to run.
Navigate to this key in the left panel: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E967-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
Verify that the right panel has a value called (Default) with the data “Disk drives.”
Look for a value called “LowerFilters” which will have your shock protection driver’s name in it (usually hpdskflt or thpdrv but can be something else).
Click “LowerFilters” and hit DELETE.
Say “yes” when prompted. The value “LowerFilters” will vanish.
Reboot. The computer should boot up normally.

This will not fix boot splash stuck problems on every machine, and on rare occasions, Last Known Good doesn’t work to get back into Windows. I can’t guarantee this fix will work for everyone, but in my experience performing Windows reinstalls (especially when doing a Windows 8.x downgrade to Windows 7) this is a common problem.

Please leave any feedback or thanks in the comments below!

My take on Windows 8, Metro, touchscreens, and other desktop disasters

Posted on May 20, 2012 by Jody Bruchon

Windows 8 has this shiny new user interface that’s known as “Metro.” I hate Metro. LOTS of people hate Metro. Metro is supposed to be easier for touchscreen usage, but Windows is a desktop operating system. I don’t want to re-hash everything that other people have written about why Metro is garbage, so I’ll just drop a few points to get my ideas across.

Metro is designed specifically with touchscreens in mind. Some all-in-one desktop computers are now touch-capable, and Windows 8 is supposed to become available for ARM architectures so that Windows 8 can be used on new tablets. However, there are two major problems: MOST desktop and laptop computers DO NOT HAVE TOUCH CAPABILITY AT ALL (that’s the vast majority of what it runs on) and TOUCH IS NOT PRACTICAL FOR DESKTOP USE.
Touchscreens require holding your arm up to manipulate what we traditionally would use a mouse and pointer to work with. That’s fine for a minute, but if you think your arm is NOT going to get tired ten minutes into touchscreen-centric hell, you’re fooling yourself.
Have you seen the Explorer windows? They brought that awful, terrible “ribbon UI” from Office 2010 into Windows 8. Not only is it annoying as hell to use, it’s counterintuitive: with monitors trending towards widescreen displays, vertical screen space is in much shorter supply, while ironically still being the most needed type of screen space for office applications and for seeing more files at once in Explorer’s “details” file view. Yet somehow, Microsoft’s logic is to replace one toolbar with something that’s three toolbars in height. Way to go, you idiots. (If a ribbon popped out of the left or right, it’d make more sense, but ribbon organization is actually less efficient than toolbars, in my opinion.)
Start button in desktop mode: GONE. WHY?! The Start button paradigm was revolutionary. There’s a reason that it’s persisted since the introduction of Windows 95, and is often imitated in many Linux desktops: it gets the job done, and does so pretty well, as long as you didn’t have 100 folders inside it (and Vista fixed that with the introduction of a scrolling Start menu programs list that ACTUALLY HAS A FREAKING SCROLL BAR…what took so long to come up with that?!)

If I was to advocate for a radical UI change, I’d want to see something more like Fluxbox on Linux systems. I can right-click anywhere on the “desktop” to get a program menu, with no Start button required. If I use a Fluxbox theme with rounded top corners on the windows, I can launch my mouse to the upper-left or upper-right corners of the screen (two of the most prominent “hotspots” as any skilled UI designer will tell you) and right-click to get said menu as well. Right-clicking on the title bar brings up all of the window management functions I could ever need. Fluxbox isn’t the prettiest thing in the world, and it’s a little weird to someone who is used to choosing between “Start menu” and “Mac dock” ways of working with programs, but being able to call up a Start menu of sorts without even needing the button in the first place isn’t hard to get used to, and is much faster than having to aim for a button.

Honestly, I’ve gotten spoiled by Fluxbox and Linux. I can’t believe how fast a huge application like Firefox starts up under Fluxbox. Ubuntu and other distributions with heavy full-blown desktop environments are on par with Windows, but with a minimalist one like Fluxbox, the world just seems so much faster, even with an unaccelerated VESA video driver.

I digressed a bit, but the moral of the story is this: simple is beautiful, fast, and functional. All this metro/ribbon/touchy crap wastes screen space, slows things down, and frustrates users. I knew things were going sour when Windows had keyboard shortcut accelerator underlining disabled by default, but I didn’t know we would end up with this Metro disaster. I’m making a call out to everyone to advocate for a simpler desktop that doesn’t need to change for the sake of change because it’s functionally sound and easy to work with, without the eye candy and bells and whistles and massive tool ribbons.