What's with the forced kid-ification?
Treating valued customers like "stupid endusers" seems to be Microsoft's goal in their newest desktop operating system.
I just completed a rebuild of my desktop machine at work, a p3-500 Gateway with 192M of RAM. The OS/App partition is 6GB, just to give you an idea of what I'm dealing with.
My first annoyance was with the sheer size of the OS install -- almost 3GB! When space is at a premium, this is NOT the OS for you. When I got the OS installed, then come the 18MB of security updates, which I had to download onto my (presumably) unsecure box.
Next, since my business relies heavily on Outlook as an email/Exchange server client, I installed that. Guess what... OUTLOOK XP uses MS Messenger. What?? What if I dont want it to? Oh wait, I have to go in and turn that off somewhere. Fun.
But Outlook's not the only thing that uses it. So does IE. Oh, and every time you boot up, if you havent attached a Passport to your system, it asks you. Screw that, I say, someone out there has to have been upset enough to find a workaround... Thank you techtv.com for the answers!
Another annoyance of Outlook (and it tells you, very proudly, that it did this...) is the stripping out of "Additional linefeeds" from incoming email.
Back to WinXP itself.. does anybody else find those little animations and fade-in/fade-outs annoying? How about the Autoplay of CD's ("what should I do with these media files?") Glad I could shut Autoplay off in the properties of the cd-rom drive.
I did manage to get rid of the kiddyland look and feel of XP, but only by visiting themexp.com. I highly recommend it.
One last annoyance: Visual Studio dotNET. What a piece of crap installer. 5 disks (it used all 5) and all I really wanted was the development environment itself. I didnt need the c#, c++, and visual basic tools. But, I had to install at least one to get the dev env.
That's enough griping about that. Now back to fun with Access reports.