Here is a list of things that are driving me nuts in Vista and things in which they need to enhance or improve…
The Name Grouping. A-H, I-P, Q-Z. Needs to go back to XP’s style which is group by, A,B,C etc.
Or at least give the option to have XP style grouping.
Sidebar doesn’t remember gadget settings when re-adding. (Update: some gadgets do seem to remember/save their settings. So I guess it’s up to the gadget writer to implement this feature)
The file filtering list needs to have an option to select all items, which then would allow you to quickly deselect items. Because sometimes I want to see 15 file types out of 20 in the filter. So it would be a lot faster to just un-tick the 5 items than to select all wanted 15 items.
Indexing needs to be more alert to file changes and creation.
The Indexer needs the option to PAUSE or FORCE indexing regardless of user activity. Just like WDS 3.0 has on Windows XP.
Metadata support via a database file for all files that don’t have native support for tags. PNG, MPEG etc.
Office should be able to create a “Previous Version” for documents every time X amount of saves are done, and not just a daily backup that is done when system restore creates a snapshot.
You should be able to give a file type a custom icon!!! (YOU CAN IN XP)
Sidebar doesn’t scale to DPI changes. (Well actually it does, but the gadgets don’t)
Stacks should visually display how many Items are in each stack and not just be a Generic Static Icon.
When displaying folders contents in Stacks, it should simply be remembered in Explorer without having to save it as a search folder to remember the view.
An option to group search results displayed in the start menu further. E.g. instead of just displaying the heading “FILES” it would be nice to have Music, Pictures, Documents etc.
Search box needs to display files that include most words. E.g. If I search for the song Don’t Fear the Reaper, but type in Dont Fear the Reaper, missing the “ ’ ” It won’t show any results at all.
Another example of Search needing to be less strict was when I used the start menu search to find a document. I wanted to find a text file that contained some game settings. I typed in “CSS Rates” only to find nothing coming up. So I then typed in “CSS Rates Settings” again nothing. So I then went to the Documents folder to look for the file the good old way. And there it was titled “CSS Rate Settings”. To me this was very annoying since imo it still should have shown up even though I missed typing in that “S”. Maybe a way to solve this problem would be for search to say, “Did you mean CCS Rates?” Just like the online search engines do when you spell something wrong or there is a close match.
Ability to change the Start menu’s folder links (e.g. the Documents link), to point to a Virtual / Search folder.
There isn’t a way anymore to clear the most used programs menu in the start menu. You have to navigate to Taskbar and Start menu properties> Start menu Tab>Privacy, Store and display list of recent programs. Click the tick box to turn it off, hit apply. Then re-tick it and hit apply! Why not just have a clear button?
The ability to add WMA and MP3 files to the windows sound scheme, it still only supports wav! Because I want to have some nice surround sound start-up’s in WMA format but I still can’t. You know, even though its 2007!
WPG needs to use Dithering like XP did to smooth out images when zoomed in. But dithering must be turned off when in Fix mode.
The Details pane for a search folder should display the filters and search parameters for the search folder. For example if I create a search folder that looks for Word 2007 documents with a “Windows Vista” Tag in the In the Public Documents and my user documents folder only. I should see all those parameters displayed.
Search Folders need to be editable. Instead of having to re-create an entire search folder all over again just to change a single parameter.
The start menu search should not display duplicate links. For example, in a search result for a certain document that also has a shortcut for it in the recent documents folder; it will display both a link to the document and a link to the shortcut to the document. The Start Menu search should filter through shortcuts and only display them if there is no search result for the target of the shortcut.
You should be able to delete a single system restore point. To do this at the moment you have to simply turn System Restore entirely off, and then back on. This offcourse deletes ALL your restore points. Which isn’t what I want to do.
Windows Photo Gallery (WPG), CAN’T play GIF files. It just displays the first frame. And IE opens GIF’s by default.
I think they did this to stop people from editing the GIF in WPG, only to find out once they save it, they loose the animation (other frames). So I still think they should use IE to view Gifs by default. But just make WPG be able to play gifs if the user chooses to either have WPG as the default program or simply if the user is browsing/viewing Gifs from within it.
The UAC dialog boxes should always be centred on the screen.
Paint’s Save dialog box should offer the ability to Tag the file. If saving the image as a non supported format, e.g. a PNG, the non supported fields would be greyed out.
The new Volume Mixer should have the option to display currently running applications before they output sound. This will allow you to adjust volume prior to the initial sound made from the app. Also there should be the option to view previously listed applications. Again so that you can alter their volume state or un/mute them before they have started. This could all be handled in a similar way in which the Notification Area handles the “customise” hidden icons option under the Taskbar and Start Menu properties.
The volume Mixer should also show each applications volume output (the green bar). Currently it only shows this for the Master Volume.
If a file is not Indexed (due to Indexing playing up [which seems to be happing a lot]) when using the Search box in Explorer to filter through filenames, it will not display the file since it’s not indexed! To fix this you have to turn on the search pane, then click on search non-indexed items. I personally find this VERY big problem. Because you might quickly navigate to a folder to search for a file and be lead to believe it’s not there when really it is! So my suggestion to fix this would be to make the “Search Box” by default search for non-indexed items even when the folder is indexed.
If a Desktop icon is placed in either of the 2 top corners of the screen, you can’t drag a selection box to highlight multiple icons on the desktop. Since the icons mouse over stretches all the way over to the very corner pixel which of course means you end up dragging the icons instead of a selection box.
When Windows Update has many updates available, and you want to hide a few of them, you have to keep right clicking on each one separately and then click hide. Which can be very time consuming when wanting to hide multiple updates at once, (e.g. the language packs). To order to make this easier you should be able to select multiple items at once either via a tick box or by using the CRTL and SHIFT keys. Then you can just right click and go hide, which would hide all selected items in one go.
There needs to be a smooth maximize and restore animation. Since there are really smooth window open/pop, min/max and close animations. There needs to be something to merge the bumpiness when restore or maximizing a window.
The max/min animations should be played when an app is running in the notification area (system tray).
Windows Mail (if not Outlook 2007 as well) should sync with Vista’s Contacts Explorer. To be honest, I’m totally amazed that they made a Contact Explorer in which Windows very own Mail program doesn’t even use!!!
(Update: Windows Live Mail is a free desktop client based Email program that will replace Windows Mail. This finally integrates with Windows Contacts. However Outlook 2007 still doesnt).
