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Windows Vista Annoyances
Book Review22 January 2008
by Huw Collingbourne
Windows Vista Annoyances - $34.99 (£21.99)
by David A. Karp
O’Reilly http://www.oreilly.com/
642 pp.
ISBN-10 0-596-52762-4
ISBN-13 978-0-596-52762-4
“Windows Vista is like a papaya: sleek on the outside, but a big mess on the inside.”
No, not my words (though I confess to being broadly sympathetic to the sentiment) but those of David A. Karp, author of O’Reilly’s ‘Windows Vista Annoyances’. I get the distinct impression, however, that when Karp says this of Vista he’s being a little more flattering than he really intends. Read on and you’ll soon find out that he doesn’t really think it’s sleek on the outside at all!
The Control Panel, he says, is “a hodge-podge of modern web-like pages and older, pre-Vista tabbed dialog Windows. Some of the dialog windows date back more than a decade to Windows 95...”. The Windows Explorer doesn’t exactly get an unqualified thumbs-up either: “The defaults are set in favor of a ‘simpler’ (read dumbed-down) interface, which has the unfortunate and ironic side effect of making many everyday tasks lie organizing files, sharing folders over a network and even opening certain folders, more difficult.”
It’s not all negative, though. The book is packed with useful information on how to customize Vista, speed up some things and make other things more reliable or less irritating. For example, it explains how to get Internet Explorer to remember its own settings instead of apparently randomly displaying file details, icons, tiles and a bewildering mix of alternative column headers as you navigate from one directory to another.
There are chapters on the user interface, the registry, multimedia, performance, general troubleshooting, network and internet issues, scripting and security.
The author shares my strong dislike of “the horrendously annoying” User Access Control (UAC) which “forces you to endure repeated prompts for even the most mundane tasks in Control Panel” - and he devotes most of a chapter to taming the darn’ thing. I must admit that, in spite of the security risk, I disabled UAC on my PC some time ago as it was just so infuriating. However, now that I’ve read David Karp’s guide to this subject, I may consider re-enabling it - I didn’t previously realise there were ways of keeping it in action without all the nags!
In the short time I’ve been reading this book, I have already discovered a few useful tweaks to customize the Windows Explorer, the UAC and a few other Vista annoyances. This is quite a long book, however (over 600 pages) and I’ve hardly scratched the surface yet. I have every hope that, as I work my way through the rest of it, I will discover a good many more useful ways of making Vista liveable-with.
The book isn’t the answer to every problem you may encounter. I still haven’t worked out why some of my old mpg videos and RealAudio sound files refuse to play sound when I run them on Vista. But the book has introduced me to some free ‘codec analysis’ tools that at least try (though thus far have not succeeded) to offer solutions to these sorts of problems. Maybe if I keep battling away I’ll eventually come up with a fix...
Having used Vista ever since its launch, I must admit that I have not grown to love it. XP was far from perfect but it was, at least, a good deal less annoying. It’s now a bit late in the day for me to try to move all my applications back onto XP. My next best option, then, is to make Vista as un-Vista-like as possible. “Windows Vista Annoyances” is the most helpful resource I’ve yet found to help me accomplish that.