I have thus far, sometimes with the aid of muffled screams, avoided ranting about the experience of using Windows Vista on my new laptop. Gladly I would have continued with XP, but this one came pre-installed, and I can't be bothered to strip it all out and redo everything. The point in getting the laptop was to boost productivity and activity, not to spend hours/days reinstalling everything.
At any rate, Vista sucks, but not horribly. At least not once I overrode all of the default settings to not display extensions, or file paths, or file types, or all of the other user friendly, child proofed bullshit they layered in to keep people who know what they're doing from actually being able to use the computer. The first couple of days were fairly maddening though, and I still hate how the directory structure is set up, with nothing on the actual root C: drive, and (almost) all my stuff in an "Eric" subfolder.
Not everything is there, of course. Lots of applications do install to the root, but not all, which makes hunting down the actual location of files and programs something of a hit or miss endeavor. The most annoying this thus far was importing all of my email archives from my old computer. I'm using Thunderbird on both machines, and the format of the files is unchanged, but Vista stores them in a different location, multiple layers deep, and it's one you'd never guess by logic. I only found it since the Thunderbird wiki had a help page with the location.
I also hate all the default folders and locations for files. I don't want to put my pictures in the pictures folder. Or my videos in the videos folder. I have pictures in dozens of different folders depending on what they're associated with. I have photos for this website, diablo 2 and 3 photos, personal photos that don't go online publicly, pictures for school and other projects, etc. I can see the utility of the photos and other folders for some users. My dad, for instance, saves pictures from email and the web into whatever default directory opens up in XP, which results in him never being able to find them again. I save them where I want them, and can therefore (usually) find them again. I resent and resist the default folders for these functions, most of which I can't delete, or don't dare, since Vista forces some applications to partially install there, or to store their images there by default. So they remain, cluttering up my otherwise pristine and organized directory stucture.
There was a bunch of other bullshit that tripped me up early on, but I've mostly forgotten it by now. Largely with the aid of alcohol.
Today though, I've finally found something I had to blog about. I've been doing picture editing for the Diablo I wiki; cropping bosses and other interesting illustrative events out of screenshots. They're shots from old D1 or Hellfire, which stores the screenshots in .pcx format, which nothing default of Windows can view. Annoying, but Windows couldn't view them in Win95 or WinXP, so Vista failing there isn't exactly a surprise. Besides, I have to crop all the shots in photoshop anyway, so I just open them there, crop or otherwise manipulate, and then save as .gif. I could save as .jpg, but the shots are only 256 colors, so what's the point, when gifs have better image quality at that color depth? Besides, I have to dick with the "Image > Mode > RGB color" first, before it'll let me save .pcx files as .jpgs. (Yes, I should just set up a quick PS macro to automate that menu-cruising bullshit.)
Helpfully, Vista "upgraded" of the picture viewer, and in addition to various removing useful features, (no more zoom icon, making it impossible to zoom in on any location; you've got to zoom the whole image and then click/drag to see the part you want to close up on) they took out the ability to view gifs with it. Why? Good question. Because they can?
So now I've got a folder full of gifs that I often need to click through to find the appropriate one. And no, of course the thumbnail view isn't detailed enough to see what I want to see. Not when I'm running 1920x1200 resolution. At first I thought they must have inadvertently left it off of the default "open with" option. The first gif I clicked on opened in MIE, which I hadn't otherwise run on this machine. Which showed that gif fine, but was useless since I couldn't use it to navigate through the other shots in the folder. So I closed it and right clicked "open with"... and Windows Picture Viewer isn't an option. I could browse to add it... but how the hell would I do that? It's a Windows application, and I've got no idea where it's stored on the machine, since Vista is purposely designed to make finding such applications almost impossible.
I was going to look online for the location, but just for the hell of it, I tried the Windows help first, and after digging through a few pages I found this explanation about Photo Gallery (which I was hoping would have some way to revert to the WinXP style, which was much better):
Photo Gallery is intended to show and edit digital pictures from cameras and scanners, so some older file types that are not commonly used for digital pictures today will not appear in Photo Gallery. If you have picture files with .gif extensions, for example, they will not appear in Photo Gallery and can't be edited using the Fix pane. If you want to see these pictures in Photo Gallery, you should change their file type to a format that Photo Gallery can display (JPEG is recommended).
You'll be unsurprised to learn that Vista does not include any utility to execute such a "change" of file type. Nor that the help doesn't say how you could do that. (I can obviously do it with Photoshop, but most users don't have such a program, or know how to use it.) That's beside the point, though I'm sure it's provoked some outrage in people who had gif images that they could no longer view after installing Vista. The real point is why? What possible reason could there be to disable viewing a very common file type? This sort of thing is why people hate Microsoft. It's not just their incompetence and avarice; it's that they seem to go out of their way to fuck you, sometimes. Just because.
So, anyone got any recommendations for a useful 3rd party freeware tool that works like the Windows Picture Viewer and will show non-.jpg images too? I'll have to search one one later today, cause converting hundreds of gifs to jpgs is out of the question, as is using a browser window to view one image at a time.
All that said, I'll give Vista credit for one thing. It's better with higher resolutions. I could not get text to display properly on my old desktop, into the new monitor at 1920x1200. Text, in documents or through the browser, was always too large or too small. Too skinny, mostly, so I'd increase the size until suddenly it went super bold, and read like a huge block lettered random note. Plus, the text on different web pages showed up in very different sizes. Some would be disclaimer fine print size, others like the top row in an eye chart. None of this is a problem in Windows. Pages look just fine, consistent in size, 10 point font is very readable in my documents, etc. I don't know what it does or how it equalizes the visual volume levels, other than using some kind of truetype ability to scale up the text, but it's much appreciated.
There, I said something nice about Vista in the end. (And I bet there's some kind of update to XP I could have downloaded to give it support for better text readability at higher resolutions. I never looked, since the desktop was dying anyway.)
BTW, this was the 1000th post I've made using the Blogger script. Yes, I'd hoped for something more as well. Still, Microsoft bashing never goes out of style.
Update: The most popular image viewer on download.com was something called FastStone Image Viewer, and it's working nicely. It kind of mimics Explorer in layout, showing all the images in thumbnail size, but when you click one it shows in a resizable space to the lower left, below the file tree. And with my big monitor and high resolution, I've got plenty of space to view the full sized 640x480 images there, which is convenient. I don't think it would be that great for going through a library of larger images; you can't just view them full size and next/back through them easily, but it's great for this
working-with-gifs project I have underway.
Labels: microsoft, vista
