Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Windows Woes: Windows Update Updates & Text Selection

The Windows operating system is and probably always will be an untamed beast of a problem.

Being a Windows user, one who spent money on a copy of Windows and use it often, I believe I have the right to complain about it. Windows Woes will be a category of posts that should be very self-explanatory. I will (usually) rant about some poor or unconventional feature of the Windows OS.

This first one is a twofer; I'll highlight two issues that just straight-up bug me this time, but usually each Windows Woes post will just contain one.

Windows Update...Update?
Windows Update. Update this, update that. Windows loves updates, and usually Microsoft releases new updates every week or so. Lots of fun with restarting and configuring your computer, and then restarting again, and then updating again, then restarting yet again, etc.

But what if you can't update, period?

This problem was amazingly unfun and stupid to fix.

If you can't update at all, what do you do? You try to fix it. I did everything I could look up and find for fixing this issue: restarting all the proper services, running the Windows Update troubleshooter (located at Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Troubleshooting\System and Security), restarted five times in total...problem still remained.

So I start trying random things. I go to change my settings for Windows Update and switch my updating to "Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them" from "Install updates automatically (recommended)" and apply the settings.

Suddenly I can use Windows Update again! My random tweaking worked, thank goodness.

But what's this?

Yeah. You read that right the first time.

What the hell? Windows Update needs an update before I can even update Windows? And to make matters worse, I have to restart my computer before I can do anything?

Oh no you don't. What an awful operating system mechanic. In Linux I don't have to restart my computer to do anything involving update manager updating (not like it matters, Linux is lightning-quick every day, all day). Why should I have to go through yet another restart/configuration sequence just to update Windows Update?! It's stupid!


Open/Save File Name Selection
This one is more hidden. It's very specific and more of an annoyance than a bad problem. You know those Open... or Save As... windows that pop up? Here's an example for context:

See that "File name:" field?

Yeah, you know what this is. You see it all the time when saving and opening files, among other things.

But you know what's annoying? If you click in the "File name:" text field, Windows automatically highlights all of the text.

I click in it once, this happens.

If I want to rename the entire document, I'll select all the text myself! I want the cursor to go to the spot I click at without highlighting anything. It's simple to select all the text in the text field anyway: Ctrl+a, Home+hold Shift+End, End+hold Shift+Home. It hardly takes any time and it isn't difficult to do.

This is especially annoying if I'm in Photoshop and I want to name a series of images the same with numbers at the end of each image's file name such as windowsisbad1.png, windowsisbad2.png, etc. I just want to save each image with a similar name, but change the number at the end. I should be able to click at the far right end of the file name, hit Backspace and then put the new number. But no. I have to click twice, once first to select all the text as Windows stupidly defaults to, and then a second time in the same spot to deselect all of the text and put the cursor at the end of the text line. And you have to wait a brief moment in between the first and second clicks, otherwise Windows will deny the latter.


Conclusion
What other conclusion is there? Windows is annoyingly full of flaws. Microsoft is lucky that I basically have to play and emulate games on Windows, otherwise I would burn every copy and remove every installation of it that I own.

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