Windows is Still Shit
From Zanecorpwiki
Don't get me wrong. Every operating system has it's problems. Windows, however, is in another league. It's getting worse. The security model is absolutely insane and the implementation is ad-hoc. There's so much cruft and hidden stuff, it's amazing they got anything to work. It costs an insane amount of money. It's slow.
It does have some good points, but I haven't seen a single feature that isn't standard in both Linux and Mac, and usually Windows is the worst of the three in terms of implementation. Linux even looks better now-a-days. The eye candy in the Windows interface is so heavy, like caked on cosmetics. Rather than enhancing and pleasing, it's distracting and vulgar. At one point, the hard drives on the machine I was working on chattered for 60 minutes and the "copy update" window sat there frozen. Wasn't a system lock, it was doing something and everything was still responsive, it just just poor programming. The update window was not getting any new information and I had no idea what was going on.
Not that the system didn't hang and crash with astounding frequency. While doing nothing but copying files, I experienced two soft crashes (Windows Explorer had to restart) and one hang. In all seriousness: if after 30 years of being in the business you can't write an operating system that can reliably copy files, you should just leave. Money aside, it's just embarrassing. Windows is such a shitty product, I feel quite confident pointing to the fact that the company is still around as an instance of market failure.
I am currently helping my Mother and aunt setup new computers.
Goal: copy files from old computer.
Approach: put old drive in external USB enclosure, plug in and copy everything.
Steps:
- plug in old drive
- create 'old drive' folder on desktop
- copy literal old drive to old drive folder
Result: Windows is shit.
At first, it looked like it was working... which is part of the problem. When things fail, it should be obvious. If I say "copy this folder" and you in fact cannot copy the folder, the worst possible response is "folder successfully copied." However, that is the approach Windows takes.
The problem is that the access controls security settings on items on the original disk don't allow everyone to access the files. Well, that's not a problem in-and-of-itself. When acting as an administrator, you can copy the files, but copy procedure doesn't. It silently drops the recursive folders. What's even worse, it will ask you about direct-descendant files saying something about "you have to use administrator privileges to copy this file; ok/cancel" which naturally makes one think that it will copy protected items, you just have to override the default. In reality, Windows has taken the baffling route of asking sometimes and silently dropping files in other cases.
Non-solution one: update the security settings on the drive. Problem: need to update settings for all the files. It looks as if I change the settings for the old drive, it updates settings on some, but not all the files on the drive. Is it just the direct descendants? Why them and no one else? Why isn't there a recursive option? Why is this simple operation so opaque? Setting aside obvious missing features, it's not at all clear what changing the permissions on the old drive actually does.
Non-solution two: use the "backup this drive" option. Problem: windows try to launch the 'windows backup' which only supports backing up attached media to some other media that isn't C: drive. There's no (obvious) way for Windows to do this simple, common operation.
Terrible solution: I'm sure there's some better solution to this problem, but only visible solutions get counted. The only visible is to manually recurse and compare each folder on the old drive.
