So tired of Windows...

I'm so tired of Windows.

Now that our household is all Mac, it pains me to sit down in front of a Windows box at the office for a protracted session of hourglasses and abort/retry/ignore.

There are several issues that have got me pretty steamed. Every now and then, one of those Mac vs PC flame war threads starts up and people pile on one another and eventually the thing gets closed. This time it could work.

You see, nobody has to sell me on Mac. I'm sold. Nobody has to sell me on Windows. Thanks to my employer, I can't leave. This leaves the thread open to actually help me make Windows easier to live with for somebody so used to a Mac. Ok here goes...

Icons on the Task bar...
Icons run around my task bar like roaches when the lights come on. It's awful. As I'm getting ready to go home after a long, I sometimes have a dozen windows open. As I close them, groups of like items explode and become separate because I'm not fast enough to get there and pick "close group". What makes matters worse is that ****able Excel 2007. The close group is greyed out. Is there a hidden registry tweak to un-grey the close group option for excel? So this annoyance has 2 parts: Excel refuses to play nice with the close group feature and windows is always faster than me when it comes to ungrouping things. If only it was faster than me for things I actually wanted it to do.

Freezes/Start Menu...
Excel 2007 refuses to run more than one instance and I cannot easily compare spreadsheets side by side. I must go to the start menu. I have launchy but sometimes it doesn't find apps by name since the exe name and the app name often have nothing to do with one another. So this leaves me dealing with the start menu. Only it's frozen. So there are 3 annoyances here in one item: inability to open multiple excel windows without a fight, inability to navigate the start menu without freezes, inability to find excel using launchy because of file naming issues.

Hello? Is anybody there?
Freezes. Man I've lost count of the hours I've spent waiting for windows to wake up and respond to my mouse clicks. My hands are tied. The crackheads in IT have Mcaffee locked down and all its meaningful options greyed out. What else can I do to get my machine back? I don't mean hacking. I'm looking for a way to get a usable machine without getting fired for hacking through all the IT stuff. The biggest issue is that the machine is unresponsive for seconds and often minutes at a time.

Moving Buttons...
Moving buttons. Often I reach for a button with the mouse but by the time I've clicked, it's up and moved on me. This happens in quite a few applications. What kind of brainless oaf designs software with widgets that move while you are trying to work with them?

Lotus f-ing Notes...
Lotus Notes. If anything will make you hate a computer, it's Lotus Notes. The guys that wrote this piece of crap need to be waterboarded. Are there any Lotus Notes tips and tricks that can make this piece of ---t easier to stomach?

So that's my short list. For now. I'm so tired of windows but can't leave. I suspect somebody knows workarounds for some of these painful issues short of tendering a letter of resignation or sending my computer down the elevator shaft. Home: Macbook OS X 10.5.5. Office: Dell D630 XP Pro. To give you an idea of my "tolerance" for unresponsive machines, if I see the spinning beachball for more than 5-10 seconds, I'm already going for Force Quit at home. OTOH, the length of my fuse at the office is 90+ seconds. 90 seconds is the typical hourglass time for a process running normally. No my disk is not full. Yes I do have at least 1 gig of RAM.

Please resist the temptation to argue the merits of one OS over another. Keep it to yourself. I don't need to hear it. I'm looking for tips and tweaks to make my work pc a little less torture. I'll come back to this thread as I remember more things that don't work like I think they should as well as to hear your suggestions. Thanks In Advance...

 

If Windows bothers you so much, why don't you use Mac OS at work?

 

Icons on the Task bar...
Icons run around my task bar like roaches when the lights come on. It's awful. As I'm getting ready to go home after a long, I sometimes have a dozen windows open. As I close them, groups of like items explode and become separate because I'm not fast enough to get there and pick "close group". What makes matters worse is that ****able Excel 2007. The close group is greyed out. Is there a hidden registry tweak to un-grey the close group option for excel? So this annoyance has 2 parts: Excel refuses to play nice with the close group feature and windows is always faster than me when it comes to ungrouping things. If only it was faster than me for things I actually wanted it to do.

CTRL+ALT+DEL and just nuke excel (kill process) or just shut down the computer and windows will just automatically close what ever programs that are open

Freezes/Start Menu...
Excel 2007 refuses to run more than one instance and I cannot easily compare spreadsheets side by side. I must go to the start menu. I have launchy but sometimes it doesn't find apps by name since the exe name and the app name often have nothing to do with one another. So this leaves me dealing with the start menu. Only it's frozen. So there are 3 annoyances here in one item: inability to open multiple excel windows without a fight, inability to navigate the start menu without freezes, inability to find excel using launchy because of file naming issues.

No idea lol

Hello? Is anybody there?
Freezes. Man I've lost count of the hours I've spent waiting for windows to wake up and respond to my mouse clicks. My hands are tied. The crackheads in IT have Mcaffee locked down and all its meaningful options greyed out. What else can I do to get my machine back? I don't mean hacking. I'm looking for a way to get a usable machine without getting fired for hacking through all the IT stuff. The biggest issue is that the machine is unresponsive for seconds and often minutes at a time.

No idea

Moving Buttons...
Moving buttons. Often I reach for a button with the mouse but by the time I've clicked, it's up and moved on me. This happens in quite a few applications. What kind of brainless oaf designs software with widgets that move while you are trying to work with them?

Probably the mouse...happens sometimes when I use an old school computer

Lotus f-ing Notes...
Lotus Notes. If anything will make you hate a computer, it's Lotus Notes. The guys that wrote this piece of crap need to be waterboarded. Are there any Lotus Notes tips and tricks that can make this piece of ---t easier to stomach?

Never heard of Lotus notes before

I've never had these issues with XP so maybe its the company's computers/network issue? Sorry if this doesn't help...

EDIT: Noticed in your sig that you have a MB? Is windows xp acting the same in bootcamp/vmware/parallels? If not why not just use your MB?

 

LOL... Not everyone's company says, "So which kind of computer would you like to use?"

Unfortunately I haven't used most of the programs you're using, but I'll address the items I know about.

The close group issue: I find this to be a minor annoyance too. I don't have a complete solution, but a few things can mitigate this somewhat.
1. Many (though not all) programs can be exited via their menubar: File > Exit.
2. You can select multiple taskbar buttons using control-click and treat them like a group: http://www.colinneller.com/blog/ControlClickTaskbarAwesome.aspx
3. If you close the grouped windows first, they won't have time to explode. (Of course if everything is in a group, this doesn't help.)

Don't know about Excel 2007, but... in Excel 2003 I seem to remember some File > Open... (menubar) way of opening a second document. I would expect it to have an equivalent in the ribbon UI...

As for the start menu being slow, I don't know, that's not normal, but I'll talk about performance problems in a minute...

You can put commonly-used applications on the desktop or in Quick Launch (to the right of the start button), or both. Or run an icon-based app launcher like RocketDock or ObjectDock.

Yikes that's crazy.

When Windows is slow, I open task manager (ctrl-shift-Esc) and see what's hogging the CPU and/or memory. It may help to use View > Select columns... to show additional info about each process. Google can also help identify a process. And in the Performance tab, see how much RAM is being used.

Make sure defrag is run occasionally on the machine.

Reinstalling Windows might help, if you can get them to do it.

Oh yeah... it could be the network. Are all of your frequently used programs and data files on local disks, or are you using them from network shares? Can some stuff be copied to your local drive and used there?

 

My wife uses Lotus Notes on her MacBook Pro for work (IBM-er), and let me tell you she freakin' HATES it. She hated it on her Thinkpad and she still hates it on the Mac. Crashes all over the place.

 

ccleaner, registry clean it, defrag.

I don't have problems in windows really, i do the above weekly.

 

Why don't you give linux a try?
As you know, PC's hardware is not terrible. The problem is windows OS, and linux OS is very stable.

 

I should mention that I absolutely hate Office 2007. It is almost as bad as Lotus Notes. Ribbons? What an absolute waste of time. Every document opens slowly. It's embarassing. I'll be on the phone with somebody who has a question. I'll open a word doc and it will take forever to open, then it will sit there and gradually expand from 1 to 40 then to 100 pages. No matter how careful I am, I will end up scrolling to the very end of the document while word is too busy to really follow my attempt to scroll somewhere in the middle. I would consider nuking (ctrl-alt-del) Excel were it not for the fact I might lose work or get corrupted files.

It never ceases to amaze me how difficult it is for people to follow directions. There are actually a couple of posts in this thread telling me to go get Mac or Linux on a machine I don't own and cannot change the OS. For those who somehow missed the point, please allow me to remind you that this thread is not about walking away from windows because that is not an option for me.

Ctrl click the task bar? I'll have to give that a try. Every day when it's time to go, I'll give that one a shot and see if it shortens the time I would normally spend chasing icons around the task bar like roaches when the lights come on.

When I open task manager, I see Mcaffee sitting there sucking down the mips. If I try to go turn it off, it's greyed out. I got an email last week from our IT crackheads claiming to implement some faster boot and shutdown times. Yeah right. And I'm gonna grow wings and fly to work.

My machine is relatively new. It's faster than my old machine. But it has slowed down. By comparison, I've had my work PC and my Macbook about the same amount of time. My Macbook has not even hinted around about slowing down. (Neither has my 3 year old G4 Mac Mini by the way). But my work machine has slowed down. Perhaps I can install and run ccleaner and see if I can get around some of the freezes. There are some days when the start menu is snappy and responsive, but far more days when it freezes whenever I go near it.

Here's one fix I did find a while ago. Zip files. Having them associated with windows means that they get searched every time you are looking for a file. There is no way to turn this off other than elaborate registry techniques. First I had to remove the registry entry that associated zip archives with a windows program that gets called every time you do a search (I can't remember which one at the moment). Then I had to replace it with one that associated them with winzip. Now my searches are almost as fast as Spotlight. Almost.

I do notice that things work a lot better when I'm not on the network, but I have to be on the network to get meaningful work done.

I use Launchy, but I'll have to take a look at rocketdock and objectdock.

As for the moving buttons, they are not mouse related. They move all by themselves. As the page is rendering, stuff moves around. I would have to wait 30 seconds for stuff to stop moving on me so I quite often miss the button I want to click on because it moved while the dialog box was being put up by the OS. It reminds me of filling out a form in a web browser over a terribly slow internet connection. Page elements show up slowly and items move around until everything is fully loaded. There was a mouse issue the other day, though. My bluetooth mouse quit working in the middle of the afternoon and I had to switch it off and switch it back on to get it working again. This has never happened on any of my Macs.

Never heard of Lotus Notes? How lucky you are!

 

2 years ago I would have been able to help you, but since I haven't touched a pc in that time, I have forgotten all the little tricks I used to have...its amazing how quickly you can forget 10+years of learning.
So the only thing I can offer is my condolences.
a


oh I remembered something perhaps the free open office might be a solution?
or can you go back to office 2003, that was stable and pretty snappy from memory... as soon as you can get away from lotus the better.

 

It never ceases to amaze me when people are rude, or when they neglect to notice that they never mentioned that switching machines isn't an option. When you describe your problems, be much more specific than you have been in your previous posts so that people can better assist you.

With that out of the way, your performance issues sound more related to poor system maintenance; either you have an IT problem or a PEBMAC issue.

You should:
- ensuring the computer is being adequately cooled
- have the tower cleaned for dust
- run the disk cleanup utility
- defrag the hard drive
- prevent programs from automatically starting up (how many processes are you running?)
- run a virus scan in Safe mode to check whether the computer has been compromised
- turn off filesystem indexing

Computers are not perpetually running machines. They do need to be maintained, as with any other tool.

 

Perhaps I should have used a larger font?

Anyway, thanks for the disk cleanup and defrag suggestions.

BTW, I'm a long time Linux user. I absolutely love Linux. It was Linux that initially got me moving away from Windows back in 1998. Normally I am supportive of any comment that involves replacing Windows with something else, whether OS X, Linux, or Stone Knives and Bearskins. The problem with that approach is that this thread could get hijacked and become an argument focusing on the merits of the OS. I'm looking for ways to make XP Pro less painful. I can't become admin. I can't switch machines. (Actually I just did a few months ago and while things are better, they never got as good as Ubuntu or OS X). That is why I took the risk of sounding rude by reminding everyone that discussions of switching OS are not within the scope of this thread. I've been at this for quite a while and I know how quickly a thread can fall into a flame war because people get passionate about stuff that isn't even within the initial scope of the discussion.

BTW, I'm so tempted to toss an Ubuntu live cd in this work machine but I couldn't connect to anything on the network and all it would do is allow me the illusion of being able to escape the torture of badly administered XP. I suppose I should mention that fact. It's not simply XP I'm having issues with. It's sloppy administration that results in mishaps like mandatory virus scan of documents I just created half an hour ago if I want to go back in and make more changes.

Since I stopped using XP at home, my windows skills are slipping and while I know there are admin tools like Mainmenu and Onyx to keep Leopard moving along quickly, I'm looking for things I can do to the work machine that can improve response time and reduce the pain. I tried disk cleanup but it went away and got lost somewhere so I cancelled it. I think I'll defrag first and perhaps I can get disk cleanup to run in under an hour. Of course defrag can take literally all day but I'm willing to run it overnight if need be. I've got 20 gig free on a 60 gig drive so I should be able to defrag without any issues. I'm thinking of shutting off indexing. That usually helps, too.

Thanks again for your suggestions. Sorry if anything I say seems rude. That's not my intent. No need to take it personally. I just want to be proactive about keeping this thread on the topic of improving windows (without the use of a landfill ).

I guess I should own up to why this thread is here rather than in a Dell forum. OS X is my primary OS and anybody using OS X or Linux would have some idea what I mean when I say windows is "bogged down" compared to what I'm used to. There are millions of windows users who are unfamiliar with OS X and Linux but most OS X users know Windows reasonably well. If this doesn't work out, I'll go start a similar thread in the Dell forum but I'd like to let this one run a while. I've already gotten a few good tips...

 

I will have to disagree here. I know many, many Apple/OSX users who have no idea about M$ Win or Linux. From what I have seen, most OSX users have no idea about M$ Win, unless they have switched to OSX after using M$ Win for years.

I'm not bashing OSX in the least, I just can’t agree with your sweeping generalization. From what I have seen of OSX it looks promising for me. I'm hoping to own an Apple lappy/desktop sometime in the future.


^_^_^

 

I guess I'm saying that since Mac OS share sagged so low over the years but today has come back quite a bit, it is reasonable to expect a lot of OS X users were windows users for a while. But I do know of some OS X users who haven't been near windows in many years so rather than disagree, I'll simply go start a thread in the Dell forum if the suggestions in this thread begin to dry up.

Anyway, I went off and tried to run disk cleanup. It hung. So I ran defragment. It took a couple of hours but after defrag, disk cleanup ran in only a few seconds. I guess I should go ahead and run defrag once a week. I'll look around for a way to make this happen automatically. For now, my machine is noticeably faster since the defrag/disk cleanup. I had 300 meg of temporary and temporary internet files. This is an example of something I knew quite well back when I used windows at home but I forgot about the importance of deleting temp files when a machine begins to slow down. On OS X, there are daily and weekly cron jobs to take care of this but on windows the user has to remember.

So now things are less painful, but still there is that ugly Office 2007 thing. Any tips and tricks for Office 2007? (this is probably an item I'll end up taking over to the Dell forum to get responses). BTW, thanks for all the help! The pain is subsiding. (I still can't wait to get back home to my Mac though )

 

let me say that i'm a vista user, and i'm perfect with the system. fast, snappy, etc. And if vista gets so much bash, xp shouldn't be a problem.

1. use revo uninstaller and find which programs you don't need. Use a moderate uninstall of it. Mcafee is pretty bloated; try something like avg or avast. and in most companies, i see their definitons are out of date anyway. be sure its up to date, and scan your computer.
2. If office 2007 is giving you problems, uninstall it fully w/ revo. Use advanced option here. Do not re-install.
2. Use ccleaner and run. Then, use ccleaner and clean the registry. Don't go for any 3rd party "hey look, i'm free" reg cleaner programs, unless its registry mechanic or jv16, which cost money.
3. Use JkDefrag to defrag your computer.
4. Re-install MS office.

This should make your computer snappy. I did this on a old 2000 sony, and it works great. If you don't like 2007, go with 2003. If you don't like the ribbon only, there are some programs to help switch it back to the old 2003 style, but has the 2007 core.

 

Thanks, yehrulz!

I bet I could wipe Office 2007 and it would come back the next time I plug my machine in the network at the office. Our IT folks automatically put back apps if we delete them. I had assumed I couldn't solve this but in fact, I bet I could wipe Office 2007 and have it come right back. Of course, I'm thinking about calling the NOhelp desk and asking them to take this turkey off my system and give me Office 2003 back. Please! My system is slightly faster after running the built in defragger but I'll also try ccleaner and jkdefrag.

I just downloaded jkdefrag. Very cool. It runs from the command line. This means I can set up an AT task to run it weekly. And the best part is there is no install, no registry, no hooey. Just plain and simple weekly, automatic, unattended defrag! Thanks!

 

nice to help r0k,

As stated before, run ccleaner first before you defrag. If you don't do that, you are organizaing junk files on your disk, making it worst. Defrag should be the last step.
_______________________________________________________________
"I bet I could wipe Office 2007 and it would come back the next time I plug my machine in the network at the office. Our IT folks automatically put back apps if we delete them. I had assumed I couldn't solve this but in fact, I bet I could wipe Office 2007 and have it come right back."

Well, if you unplugged from your network, uninstalled 2007, did the ccleaner defrag thing, re-installed, then plugged in, wouldn't that theoreticaly work?

 

I just saw that the Open Office 3 beta is available. You could try running it as a portable app from a USB drive (therefore no installation etc.). It has promised .docx support. I am about to do this myself, although I can still use Office 2003 at work (yes, I hate 2007 with a passion as well).

 

Can you recommend a good one?

 

http://www.addintools.com/english/menuoffice/

costs money though. I think the ribbon is actually an improvment.

 

Here is a tutorial on ditching the ribbon for free. As the problem exists on my company machine, I'm not going to shell out $20-30 of my own money to correct their mistake.

I find that I'm constantly in a situation where I need to switch windows in excel, which means a trip to the view ribbon and then I quickly have to go back to the home ribbon to format cell and text colors. But wait. There's more. The color choices available are all incompatible with 97-2003 excel file format so I have to dismiss stupid warnings about loss of fidelity. You would think our highly paid IT folks would have made the default color set backward compatible since M$ was too stupid to do it. No wait. M$ wasn't being stupid. They were trying to outsmart us by burying features which are backward compatible and cramming new features down our throats. But colors? Who gives a flying floo about colors? M$ really burned us when they put all those pastel colors on top and they buried the "standard" colors about 5 menus down.

 

You've got a buggered system there buddy.

I'm NOT a big fan of Windows (big Apple admirer actually) but I've none of the problems you refer too. My suggestion would be to start with a fresh copy of the OS.

good luck
JohnG

 

The difference is you're using an application you hate (Office 2007) on a computer that has to follow company IT policies (anti-virus and other monitoring programs).

Of course at some of my old workplaces dealing with the work computer was a huge pain, but at the same time my personal computers run quickly and are fairly reliable. All are running xp or vista.

I'm sure a lot of us could sit around complaining about stupid scanning software on corporate computers.

 

My old Dell wasn't even a core duo. Even when it ran XP, it was always faster than my work pc despite the fact my work machines had faster cpus. Now that it's running Ubuntu, it's game over.

Those IT policies are a real pain. There are some up sides, like vpn that actually works. But the main complaint I have is that it often takes an excessive amount of time for me to retrieve information because of the slow performance of the OS under the weight of their IT policies along with the slow performance of Office 2007.

I have learned a few things in this thread that should allow me to speed things up a little. jkdefrag is the thing I'm most excited about because I can set it up to run as an at job and my machine should never get quite as buggered up as it was these past few weeks.

At the office, there was actually a registry file going around a few years ago that would speed things up quite a bit but it broke more than it fixed. I'm looking for a surgical approach that will allow me to speed things up without causing more problems than it solves.

 

yup yup!

just be sure to clean up before you defrag first. Please post how it works.

 

Windows' built-in defrag can be run via command line too: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/283080
And I'm sure you can run that as an at job too.

I'm not saying don't use JKDefrag, but... don't use it just because of that.

 

don't use it because of that. But still use it because its better