• The default display columns in folders containing media files are almost completely useless (e.g. often no Size or Date column is displayed) and seem to change randomly based on some kind of content-based heuristic that doesn't work. I'd rather see a file's Size than its bloody "Rating", yet the latter is a default and the former is not! Changing the displayed columns is relatively difficult as the useful ones are generally not in the column drop-down menu. Coming back to a folder after leaving it, it appears that any new content added can change the user-specified columns. In general Vista does not appear to do a good job of remembering the mode (list view, details, icons, etc.) that a folder was last displayed, and seems to change it almost randomly, with a particularly annoying habit of adding bizarre "groupings" such as "A-L", "M-Z" to the list, even for a folder with only one or two files in it.
  
  I could probably write an entire article on how problematic this single "feature" is but will instead leave off with an example: I've just opened a folder containing only very large downloaded video files (movies) on my PC and the columns are the following: Name, Date Taken (?!), Folder (!?), Tags (?), Size, and Rating (!!!). I guess somehow Vista thinks this is a picture folder, or a folder of videos from my camera, but even then I would want different tags and certainly at least one of them would be the file modification date; in this video folder "Date Taken" is of course blank for every item. And yes, I have already tried "Folder Options/View/Apply to Folders of this Type" for video folders as well as picture folders.

• Remarkably, the file viewer (e.g. "Photo Gallery") shown when double-clicking an image file is now part of Explorer itself, apparently part of the same process. So when you are viewing pictures (or videos), if the viewer crashes (a far too frequent occurence), Explorer itself crashes and restarts, which means you lose all of your open Explorer windows and/or search results. As a result of frequent crashes I've had to switch to viewing pictures in IrfanView (which I recommend) but there goes one of the key "features" of Windows Vista. Why isn't there an option to run the viewer in a separate process?
  

• There is no longer a total size of files (within the visible folder) shown in the status bar! The new status area reveals only the number of files in the folder. This is a major oversight and something that was extremely useful in XP.

• The Explorer window can only be brought to the front by clicking on the border or client area, not on the Details Pane at the bottom of the window. This is extremely annoying when Explorer is partially behind another window, as it should be possible to click anywhere in a window to bring it to the front, and the Details Pane is a much larger target than the window border. How Microsoft managed to break this time-honored UI convention is beyond me.

• The "instant search" feature Microsoft has heralded as a key Vista benefit is an even bigger disaster than it was in XP (at least there is no more dog character—now the search is itself a dog.) Until a folder has been indexed, you can't do a simple filename search, e.g. "*.jpg", unless you follow the following steps: 1) type "*.jpg" into the search box, 2) select "Search Pane" from the "Search Tools" dropdown, 3) select the "Advanced Search" UI from the menu bar, 4) click on "include non-indexed, hidden, and system files" check box, and 5) click on the Search button. And is it ever slow! The alternative of course is to have every folder full-text-indexed, but how often is a full-text search done in comparison to a filename/extension search? I shudder to think of the performance/disk space penalty for this indexing. I've not had much of a chance to use full text searching yet but I suspect there are big problems lurking here as there were in XP. Microsoft needs to return to something simple that actually works.
  

• Copy/Move dialogs don't accurately reflect progress with single files, and rarely give a time estimate, even for multiple file or folder copy/move operations. This worked poorly in XP and is even worse in Vista, though you can see they made an attempt to improve it. Sadly this is the kind of basic usability feature that OSX is almost always able to get right.
  

• Moving a large file or folder from place to place within a drive can take minutes or hours rather than the second or two it would take in XP. Moving the file itself is a trivial operation for the file system as only a pointer is changed. But the new Move dialog attempts to estimate how long it is going to take and in the process adds potentially thousands of percent of overhead time.

• Explorer menus are less useful, requiring more mouse clicks for e.g. cut/paste. It's true that the old menus are available but this means you need to have the screen cluttered with both the old menus and the new ones.

• One of the most aggravating problems with Vista is that when a folder containing media is open, the cursor frequently flickers and blinks between a wait (spinning) cursor and a normal (arrow) cursor as it attempts to preview the contained files, even if the folder is displayed in "list" view. This seems to be particularly irksome for files such as DivX videos, where Vista can even bring up a UAC prompt just to view a folder.

• The drop down list under the address bar no longer has a list of drives, instead showing a list of recent locations, which is not only less useful but also a potential privacy issue. On the topic of privacy, as has been written about elsewhere, there is no way to remove the "Recently Changed" item from the "Favorite Links" panel (although most others are customisable), making Vista less privacy-enabled than XP.

• Window sizes (e.g. Control Panel) are not preserved. I simply can't believe that every time I open Control Panel, resize and close the window, Vista simply forgets my preferences.

• This is a subtle but very annoying issue: it is not possible to tell if a file is selected or just highlighted due to the cursor hovering over it, as the appearance is the same. Clicking again to find out can result in going into rename mode (if it was in fact already selected).

• Hovering the cursor over a folder name no longer gives a sampling of the names of the contained sub-folders and files. This was a brilliant usability feature in XP, inexplicably dropped in Vista.

• Here's a major annoyance: Dragging and dropping a list of files still puts the last file into the first position in the target list. So if you select for example a set of music files from a directory and drag/drop them into Media Player, the last file is played first. Remarkably this behaviour persists from XP.

• Search: when you Save a search, which you have already waited to retrieve the results for, Explorer immediately runs the search again. Unforgivable.

Labels: Microsoft Vista Problems Annoyances Usability

1 Comments:

Thanks for writing this.

By  Anonymous, at 7:45 PM  

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