From: Chris Devers Date: 03:38 on 05 Apr 2007 Subject: shrunken Vista So this is probably too easy a target, but what the hell. Someone came to me today asking for help getting something to work on her 4 day old Vista laptop. One of those fun situations where the Damned Thing doesn't work, and it's tricky to pin down whether it's one vendor's hardware or software, or the other vendor's hardware or software, but all you can do is make sure everything is up to date & hope for the best. A tragic hope, to be sure. Providing a fun distraction from all of this, the system spontaneously went black, then came back up with the display resolution dropped from something like 1280x800 to 800x600. "Why did everything get so big?", she asked. Good question. We have half a dozen windows open, so too tedious to right-click on the desktop, better to just bring up the Control Panel. But wait, where is it? Ah, I see, it's one of about a dozen items on the second row of the Start menu, with the translucent background that makes it disappear against the window behind it. Tricky. Bring up Control Panel. We're looking at the new, streamlined, Vista iteration of this interface, apparently. It would seem that in this version they've done away with all the icons entirely, as we're staring at a blank window, with some useless text on the sidebar & some menu options up top. One of the menu options offers "Classic view", which seems promising. Click it. Icons appear! Start scanning the list, none of them look promising. No "display", no "monitor", no "resolution", etc. Hm. One of them mentions NVidia, which is exactly where one would expect a computer-industry-naive person like this to go looking for ideas. Click it. A window comes up. It offers a way to change 3D settings. And that's about it. Hm. Start debating whether we can just reboot to make the problem go away, or try the Gateway equivalent of zapping PRAM (hey why not). Back to the Start menu, nothing labelled "shutdown", "reboot", etc. Ah, but there on the bottom row, one of the buttons has the universally used (but universally un-recognized) "power" logo -- the one like a pointing-updards "C" with a line pointing up. Click it. The screen immediately goes black and the fans fall silent. Press the power button. The system immediately comes up to a login screen. "Does it really boot this fast?" "No, you just logged me out. Should I reboot?" "Please." She then takes an elaborate series of steps that I'm too annoyed to pay much attention to. A couple of minutes later, we've rebooted and the display problem remains unresolved. (We haven't even had time to deal with the original question that brought her over asking for help...). Right- click on the desktop, the context menu again offers nothing for "display" or "monitor" or anything obvious like that, but "NVidia" shows up again. Click it. A different window comes up, looking much more like the traditional Windows display settings dialog. Fix the resolution. Sheep shaved, problem solved. We never did get around to figuring out the original problem though. Now, to be fair, I am admittedly rusty and getting rustier with my Windows skills, but come on, can it really be that hard to just label things usefully? Why should someone have to know the manufacturer of the video hardware in order to make changes to the display? Why does every damned laptop have a completely different mechanism -- all with entirely too many useless knobs & switches -- for attaching to an open wireless network? What, in short, would be so bad about just offering one, simple, consistent way to do common tasks like this, rather than these further down the rabbit hole journeys into madness? It's enough to make a grown man cry, I tells ya.
From: Matt McLeod Date: 15:03 on 05 Apr 2007 Subject: Re: shrunken Vista On 4/5/07, Chris Devers <cdevers@xxxxx.xxx> wrote: > A different window comes up, looking much more like the traditional > Windows display settings dialog. Fix the resolution. Sheep shaved, > problem solved. The "right" way to do it would've been right-click the desktop, "Personalize", scroll down to the bottom of the page it presents and click "Display settings". That gets you pretty much the same old dialog box as XP has. With the nVidia drivers installed there'll also be an "nVidia Control Panel" option on the desktop context menu, but that's not Vista, that's nVidia's crapware. Vista has plenty of causes for hate -- though many of the most obvious are more "this is in a different place than it was in XP" than anything else -- but this isn't its fault. If there really was no "Personalize" on the desktop menu then that'd be some sort of weird customization from Gateway, straight-from-MS Vista doesn't do that. Matt
From: A. Pagaltzis Date: 15:15 on 05 Apr 2007 Subject: Re: shrunken Vista * Matt McLeod <matt@xxxxxx.xxx> [2007-04-05 16:10]: > On 4/5/07, Chris Devers <cdevers@xxxxx.xxx> wrote: > >A different window comes up, looking much more like the > >traditional Windows display settings dialog. Fix the > >resolution. Sheep shaved, problem solved. > > The "right" way to do it would've been right-click the desktop, > "Personalize", scroll down to the bottom of the page it > presents and click "Display settings". That gets you pretty > much the same old dialog box as XP has. So it takes wading through an extra intermediate dialog on Vista to do this? Joy. But it's called "Personalize" and has a bunch of other vaguely related settings now, so it must be user-friendlier. Right? Right? Regards,
From: Matt McLeod Date: 00:58 on 06 Apr 2007 Subject: Re: shrunken Vista On 4/6/07, A. Pagaltzis <pagaltzis@xxx.xx> wrote: > * Matt McLeod <matt@xxxxxx.xxx> [2007-04-05 16:10]: > > The "right" way to do it would've been right-click the desktop, > > "Personalize", scroll down to the bottom of the page it > > presents and click "Display settings". That gets you pretty > > much the same old dialog box as XP has. > > So it takes wading through an extra intermediate dialog on Vista > to do this? Joy. Well, in the old scheme you'd get a multi-tabbed dialog full of vaguely related settings with no real explanation of what each tab did. It made some sense to people familiar with Windows but scared the crap out of plenty of others. Now you get a menu option in the same place as the old one which brings up a web-browser-like window which pulls together those same vaguely-related things plus a few others (mouse settings and system sounds) but it *explains* what each of them is for. And no digging around for what I can only presume they found were the most common individual things end-users tried to do (change font DPI, change icons) because those get links at the top-left, no digging through anything at all. So yeah, I do actually think the new way is more user-friendly. Just like the new Control Panel is too, even though with the first thing I do is switch to "classic view" because that's what I'm used to. Matt
From: Peter da Silva Date: 03:01 on 06 Apr 2007 Subject: Re: shrunken Vista > Now you get a menu option in the same place as the old one which > brings up a web-browser-like window which pulls together those same > vaguely-related things plus a few others (mouse settings and system > sounds) but it *explains* what each of them is for. And if there's any problem with the HTML engine, you completely lose the whole thing, just like in the HTML-ized control panel applets in earlier versions of Windows. And when that happens, there's NO "genuinely simple" alternative, I warrant. Too many layers of too-complicated software to provide the illusion of simplicity. No bloody thank you. And to think I used to hate the way Macs hid what was going on... they were marvels of simplicity compared to this.
From: Matt McLeod Date: 03:13 on 06 Apr 2007 Subject: Re: shrunken Vista On 4/6/07, Peter da Silva <peter@xxxxxxx.xxx> wrote: > > Now you get a menu option in the same place as the old one which > > brings up a web-browser-like window which pulls together those same > > vaguely-related things plus a few others (mouse settings and system > > sounds) but it *explains* what each of them is for. > > And if there's any problem with the HTML engine, you completely lose > the whole thing, just like in the HTML-ized control panel applets in > earlier versions of Windows. And when that happens, there's NO > "genuinely simple" alternative, I warrant. And if there's any problem with the windowing system, you completely lose the whole thing. Same same video drivers. The HTML renderer appears to have become "core" in a way it wasn't a decade ago. It's extra complexity, no doubt, but IMO they've used it in ways that are actually useful rather than merely flashy. Now, for hateful, the Vista software for the Logitech G15 keyboard. Install it, run iTunes in the background, and you can look forward to having iTunes pop up to the front every few minutes. Brilliant design! Matt
From: Peter da Silva Date: 16:43 on 06 Apr 2007 Subject: Re: shrunken Vista On Apr 5, 2007, at 9:13 PM, Matt McLeod wrote: > And if there's any problem with the windowing system, you completely > lose the whole thing. Same same video drivers. Indeed, that's hateful too, and another reason to prefer UNIX over any version of Windows. But the HTML renderer is orders of magnitude more fragile, so this is more hateful. > The HTML renderer > appears to have become "core" in a way it wasn't a decade ago. Actually, it's almost exactly a decade since Microsoft decided it was "core". I banned Internet Explorer from our office in 1997 because they did that (not to make it "not core", but because the way they made it "core" was criminally stupid), and was amply vindicated within months when the "active content" email worms started showing up.
From: Chris Devers Date: 03:37 on 06 Apr 2007 Subject: Re: shrunken Vista On Apr 5, 2007, at 7:58 PM, Matt McLeod wrote: > Now you get a menu option in the same place as the old one which > brings up a web-browser-like window which pulls together those same > vaguely-related things plus a few others ^ I'd say that's the real problem right there. There doesn't seem to be any willingness to *take options away*. Lots of studies have shown that, on average, most people are happier & more productive when presented with a narrower range of options, not a broader one. Software preference systems need to take this in to account. The more exposure to different systems I get, the more I find that I'm happiest with the ones that hide all but the very most common knobs & switches from the normal user interface, and if there's anything else that an advanced (or, more often, too-clever-by-half) user would like to tweak, provide a completely separate interface for getting at that. For example: * Firefox has a preferences dialog, but you can also poke around in about:config, or go spelunking through various Javascript config files. * The Mac UI gives you System Preferences and preferences for most apps, but you also have the BSD layer and various plist files (often in XML) that you can tweak by hand if you want. * The Ubuntu UI seems to be doing the same thing, with simple GUI wrappers around things like apt-get, etc. * Most "web applications" -- blog engines, wiki engines, etc -- provide some customization for web accessing users, a few more for web accessing admins, and gobs more for admins with shell access. Et cetera. The vast majority of the time, for the vast majority of people, there really should just be one clearly thought out and minimally implemented standard way to adjust these kinds of things. I don't care how it's implemented so long as a reasonably intelligent person with at least some proficiency in modern computers can get the result they're after in under, say, a minute of poking around. ... But anyway, to go back to the original problem that set this rant off, keep in mind that the instigator here was the display resolution spontaneously & without provocation reducing itself. As far as I can recall, nobody even had their hands on the keyboard or trackpad when it happened. Maybe that's a hardware hate, or maybe it's software, I don't know, but spending 10 or 15 minutes trying to get that back to the way it had been didn't make it any easier to solve the problem we were really supposed to be working on... (And I'd still like to know why pretty much every Windows laptop I come across has provided a completely different vendor-provided mechanism for connecting to wireless networks. The only common theme is that they all take way too many steps to go from "turn on wireless" to "select a network". I can think of at least a dozen approaches to this problem and not one of them reduced it to the two- step process that it should be. And I can't tell if the Windows- provided procedure is any better, but I assume it must not be because all these vendors are trying to override it...).
From: demerphq Date: 17:27 on 06 Apr 2007 Subject: Re: shrunken Vista On 4/6/07, Chris Devers <cdevers@xxxxx.xxx> wrote: > But anyway, to go back to the original problem that set this rant > off, keep in mind that the instigator here was the display resolution > spontaneously & without provocation reducing itself. As far as I can > recall, nobody even had their hands on the keyboard or trackpad when > it happened. Maybe that's a hardware hate, or maybe it's software, I > don't know, but spending 10 or 15 minutes trying to get that back to > the way it had been didn't make it any easier to solve the problem we > were really supposed to be working on... Ive been reading about Vista recently and its evil "tilt bit" logic and defenses against hardware hacking to bypass DRM controls, and what you have described sounds very much like that. Laptops always have been made up of weird hardware to keep the size / heat / power / performance balance within a tolerable envelope. The logic that Vista uses to detect bus sniffing hardware or various tricks like that could quite conceivably get "confused" by laptop type hardware, which would then trigger the hacking defense behaviour which as far as I understand involves a reboot of the display subsytem into a "safe" mode with reduced capabilities. Theres a great article about this (that im too lazy to track down) that makes the point that traditionally hardware and software have been designed to be hardware error tolerant. Vista turns this on its head and treats hardware error as being a symptom of hardware hacking and disables parts of the system when it occurs. So if something goes "wrong" on Vista then it makes it worse, instead of what it should do and work around the problem. So for all you know some transistor switched state slightly too late and Vista decided to punish you for it. The hatefulness of such behaviour (and the costs of doing it) is incredible. Yves
From: A. Pagaltzis
Date: 17:53 on 06 Apr 2007
Subject: Re: shrunken Vista
* demerphq <demerphq@xxxxx.xxx> [2007-04-06 18:35]:
> Theres a great article about this (that im too lazy to track
> down)
You mean this one?
A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
Note I haven't finished reading it yet, so it may not be what you
meant. It's still on-topic and a worthwhile read, however.
Regards,
From: Zach White Date: 00:59 on 08 Apr 2007 Subject: Re: shrunken Vista On Thu, Apr 05, 2007 at 10:37:03PM -0400, Chris Devers wrote: > (And I'd still like to know why pretty much every Windows laptop I > come across has provided a completely different vendor-provided > mechanism for connecting to wireless networks. The only common theme > is that they all take way too many steps to go from "turn on > wireless" to "select a network". I can think of at least a dozen > approaches to this problem and not one of them reduced it to the two- > step process that it should be. And I can't tell if the Windows- > provided procedure is any better, but I assume it must not be because > all these vendors are trying to override it...). I'm responsible for giving machines to users at my company. When I give someone a laptop, the first thing I do is disable (uninstall, if I can) the OEM wifi configurator thingy. They're all hateful, and they all work differently. The default windows dialog is actually not all that hateful. It shows the user the available networks, and the widgets behave as you would expect them to. I have yet to run into any users who are confused by it. I can't say the same for Intel or Dell's software, however. If you can't figure out how to disable the OEM application, you can always start the "Wireless Zero Config" service. That should allow the windows dialog to configure the card. -Zach
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