What’s Wrong with Windows

This last semester, for the first time in years, I built a new Windows computer. For most things I prefer to use my Macintosh, but there are a couple of devices that Kim and I want to use that only have Windows drivers. Also having a Windows system also made my grading tasks easier for the operating systems class I was covering.

Not having had much experience with it, I chose to install Windows 7 (64-bit). In general, the experience has been really nice. The machine is snappy, and the operating system seems well designed and pretty simple to use. I do get annoyed from sometimes that Microsoft has changed long-standing Windows UI features/placement on a whim.

But one problem has plagued this system since I finished it: after going to sleep, it can take up to five minutes for the UI to become responsive. The screen would activate, the mouse would move the cursor, but attempting to use any part of the UI would just fail until the system decided to unfreeze a few minutes later. At which point all the pent up interface actions would suddenly start executing. I’ve been searching Google for a couple months for a solution to no avail — until yesterday. In a discussion of a sleep problem someone suggested turning off “taskbar auto-hide”. I couldn’t believe that would cause this particular problem, but after months with no progress I’m just desperate enough to try anything. Of course, the problem has vanished.

Further searching reveals many people with the same problem and that it’s been around since Windows 7 public beta. That means that Microsoft has had the opportunity to address this bug for almost 2 years. It’s somewhat appalling that they haven’t issued a fix considering there appears to many people who aren’t aware of the work around. Reports indicate that service pack 1, due later this year, will finally resolve the issue, but really Microsoft doesn’t earn anyone’s love or trust with this sort of lack of response to known issues.

What’s wrong with Windows? These days it is quite simply Microsoft’s treatment of it’s customers.