I have a gripe with Microsoft Windows which I feel is completely legitimate.
Whenever I set a task to do its business in the background, I expect it to stay there. Every other operating system I’ve ever used leaves background tasks in the background.
My issue comes when Windows has a process that wants your attention. It pops the window up in front of what you’re doing. This isn’t always a problem but typically it means that I don’t have time to stop typing what I was typing and invariably I hit spacebar and say OK to something I didn’t even get to read.
Sometimes this is what I wanted to do – most of the time it’s a reboot button and I’m in the middle of working on something. That really, really makes me want to strangle someone at Microsoft every time it happens.
Every other OS I’ve ever used, and there are several, handles this in a reasonable way. Either it leaves it in the background where you told it to be, or it flashes the taskbar icon or dock icon or what have you. This makes sense. The way Windows does it makes no sense whatsoever.
I understand that Microsoft uses focus groups to come up with new ways to make Windows easier but this makes Windows harder to use and it gets in the way of productivity. Sometimes it even can make me lose work. This is bad, really, really bad. An operating system’s intended functions shouldn’t be the cause of lost work. That’s just bad UI design.
So in conclusion, I hope that Microsoft executives read this gripe and do something about it. I run into this problem all the time, especially with the nearly daily Windows Updates.
I wouldn’t mind Windows wanting to reboot all the time if you didn’t force me to do it, as well. Don’t give me a 10 minute countdown while I’m working to reboot my machine. I’m busy! Feck off you! Leave me alone!
There should be no countdown. Trust that I’ll eventually have to reboot the damn thing. Geez!
I hate that too. Have you ever tried to tell Microsoft any of this crap? They are the one company that hides the ability for consumers to send comments (or I have never been able to find an address, email, number or form on their site). I think that says something.
Lauren: I found the same roadblock. I wanted to send feedback but there was no obvious way of doing so. Thus why I wrote this blog and posted it in an MS Facebook group. 😛
I don’t think I’ve ever had windows randomly pop up windows that interupt my work.
Depending on your version of windows, I’d look for a utility called “Tweak UI” for XP or “Tweak VI” for Vista.
One of the features for Tweak UI is to prevent applications from stealing focus, so this problem should never come up. You can have it flash the task bar button until you click on it, or a user selectable number of times.
This is only one of the many useful settings that you can adjust. It’s one of the first things to get installed when I do a fresh install.
Tweak UI is available from Microsoft, while Tweak VI is available from a company called “TotalIdea”. Apparently TotalIdea has an enhanced version of the microsoft Tweak UI for even more settings to change.
Nice if these were standard, but it’s better than not having them
Hey Scott,
Nice suggestion with TweakUI. I’ve never liked installing extra crap that modifies the default UI very much but this might be something I do want.
That said, the default UI shouldn’t have such an awful behaviour in the first place. Does it fix the annoying reboot prompt too?