Why I hate Windows today
I know there are plenty of excuses that people come up with for Windows, but why does it suck so much? It always seems to get in the way of doing anything.
Today I did a fresh VM install of XP so I can use it on the new job (by the way, unattended install using Parallels for Mac is breathtakingly fast when installing against the ISO). Next task, install Visual Studio 2008. Next task, install SP1. Fail. Fail. Fail. And it's the worst kind of failure too, where it just sits there and doesn't do anything to indicate it's failing. It just says, "Download starting." Only it's not. You can push cancel and look at the log, which is useless to me because I didn't write the thing.
Yesterday my fiance is offloading some photos from the camera to her Vista laptop. It renames all of the files when it copies them, and it doesn't seem to ask you if that's OK. Then if you want to copy a bunch of photos from one folder to another, and there are duplicate names (and there will be since it renumbered them), this huge, confusing dialog opens with a bunch of wordy options on what to do. How is it that Microsoft can spend oodles of cash to find out where people get stuck in Halo but they can't find their way through simple file operations?
I was playing around even with solitaire on Vista, and when you try to do something against the rules it says something like "invalid operation." Are you kidding me?
I hate Windows. I seriously do. I need it to do one thing, develop software, and once everything works it generally seems fine. But why is getting there such a pain in the ass? I've come to realize that it isn't that I'm a big OS X or Mac fanboy, it's that I seldom realize it's there. That's what an operating system should be.