My top three Windows 7 annoyances ... and some fixes!

I've been using Windows 7 for quite some time now. In fact, I got my hands on an early beta a couple of days before Christmas last year. In that time I've become quite used to Windows 7, but it's true to say too that in that time I've noticed several annoyances that seem to suggest to me that Microsoft is putting design ahead of usability.

I've had one build or another of Windows 7 installed on several on my systems. I now have the Release Candidate (RC) build installed onto several physical systems and a few virtual ones too. I've logged thousands of hours with 7 and overall my experiences have been quite positive. That said, there are annoyances. And what's odd is that most of these annoyances have been there right from the start. They're not show-stopping annoyances, and you can either fix the issue or a callous forms around it from familiarity, but they're the kind of annoyance that could well make migration from earlier versions of Windows, XP in particular, painful.

Annoyance #1: Taskbar

OK, so why am I annoyed by the Taskbar? Well, two reasons really, and I've talked about both before. The first annoyance is that it's hard to tell from looking at the Taskbar what applications are actually running and which are just links. Sure, I got used to it, but I can see a lot of people never getting used to it.

Then there's the lack of any program names on the Taskbar. Now you might think that this will encourage people to learn what icon belongs to what program, but there are still gotchas. For example, if you have RDP (Remote Desktop) connections open, you can't tell what machine you are connected to without mousing over the icon. Same with IMs, same in countless other situations.

There's a fix for this, and that's to right-click on any blank patch of the Taskbar and choose Properties, and then on the Taskbar tab you'll see Taskbar buttons options drop-down box. Choose Combine when taskbar is full. Again, there will be whole swathes of people out there who are stuck with the default.

Note: You might wonder by what process Microsoft arrives at some of these bone-headed decisions. Well, I wonder the same thing. Steven Sinofsky, president of Windows division at Microsoft, suggests that they come about because "thousands of people outside of Microsoft have provided input and influenced the feature set and design of Windows 7" ... one thing's for sure, these "thousands of people" aren't beta testers.

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Annoyance #2: Poor tray notification management

The system tray is a dumping ground that software vendors use to give their applications eye time (so when it comes time to upgrade, it doesn't come as a surprise to you to find that you had a particular bit of software installed!). Anything and everything wants to be in on your system tray, and it can quickly become stuffed with icons.

Microsoft's solution to this growing problem is hide icons. Sorry, but this solution feels like running away from the problem to me. In fact, hiding icons make the problem worse because users can end up with dozens of applications all sucking up system resources, but these apps are all hidden away.

Under Vista we had an easy and safe way to control using the System Explorer feature of Windows Defender. Under Windows 7 System Explorer is gone. You now either have to uninstall the application, or, play with MSConfig. Don't, under any circumstances, go digging through the system registry! Gaaaaahhhhh!

Annoyance #3: Too many editions!!!!

I'm going to keep on coming back to this old chestnut. In an ideal world there's be two versions of Windows 7 - Home and Professional (with maybe a cheap netbook edition too). However, in the interests of trying to get users to "upgrade" to new editions in order to unlock features of dubious function, Microsoft has introduced a whole raft of editions. I've stopped trying to get my head this mess and leave it to others to decipherit all.

While I appreciate that there's money in offering edition upgrades, and that the Anytime Upgrade mechanism is a quick, easy and painless way to upgrade (and take user's money!), the whole thing feels horribly messy. It's the complete antithesis of Apple's "one size fits them all" OS. If one of the weaknesses of Linux is the fact that there are too many distros, then Microsoft is positioning itself over the same hole. Choice is good, but too much choice can easily result in analysis-paralysis. Given XP's current dominant market share over Vista, anything getting in the way of XP users upgrading could be a big problem.

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