Windows 7 Rants, Part 1: Hunting for Font Settings & Automatic Updates

Date: 2010.02.11 | Category: Reviews, Software, Tech Stuff, Windows | Tags:

Ok, so I recently bought an ASUS U30 laptop which came preinstalled with Windows 7. I’m mainly a Kubuntu person myself, so I resized that Windows partition to fit and put Kubuntu on the rest of the drive.

The recent years of kernel development, scheduling in particular, seem to have brought an increasingly annoying trend: prioritizing IO operations in favor of user interaction responsiveness. While the KDE desktop has never been more attractive (beats Windows 7 by lengths, IMHO), that doesn’t matter a whole lot if you can’t move your mouse because updates are being installed or you’re copying some large file over the network.

Add to that a bunch of annoyances such as generally being completely unable to get vertical sync to work on any output, using any media player, on any graphics card. Or, the KDE 4.x branch in general being a Windows 95 story in rewriting in terms of beta-ish stability. Or, the inability to properly configure my multi-touch touchpad, negative 1 or 2 hours on the battery when compared to W7, going from sleep to operational every time causing a second sleep for no apparent reason then presenting an “Error 1 when suspending” or something like that, the WiFi constantly disconnecting sometimes needing an rmmod && modprobe to come back up, and so on and so forth in a seemingly endless array of problems that seem to be increasing in numbers rather than decreasing.

Quite frankly, Linux in my experience is getting worse, not better.

So, as heart-breaking as it is, I’ve decided to opt out of Kubuntu on my laptop for a while, and try out that Windows 7 thing that came with the thing in the first place.

As Windowses go, this one certainly looks better. OOB it performs way better than Vista, it seems to have fixed a few of the most idiotic usability flaws while still retaining others that were introduced with Vista; like hunting for where to change system fonts… Now where would that logically reside? Well, affordance tells us that we’d right-click the desktop, choose Properties and go to the appearance tab or whatever. Well, affordance counts for nothing, so there’s no Properties there anymore. There’s a Personalize, though, but nothing in there hints at anything about fonts… Well, maybe “Display” does a bit. But that’s not it. Although there’s an Andjust ClearType Text in there. Not it either. Set Custom Text Size (DPI)? Nope. Change Display Settings! Sorry, donuts all out. Hmmm… Try again, back. Let’s try the search input at the top. It looks like what we know from Mac OS X and KDE. Certainly, searching for “font” gives results, yay! Oh, there’s a whole section of font-related options! “Preview, delete, or show and hide fonts”, “Change Font Settings”, and “View installed fonts”. There’s also a “Display” group, but we’ve already tried those, and they didn’t do us any good. So, of course, the “Change Font Settings” must be it, it’s pretty much named after what we’re trying to accomplish, right? Well, not quite… This pane just allows us to chose whether or not to “Hide fonts based on language settings” (Huh? You can do that? I mean, what the hell does that even do?) or to “Allow fonts to be installed using a shortcut (advanced)”. Well, apart from being completely incomprehensible settings, why the hell would you even make a Control Panel page for these settings? This sounds like something that belongs in a registry setting, safely tucked away from tired eyes trying to find a useful settings page. So, the “Change Font Settings” page wasn’t actually a page to change anything sensible about fonts. I won’t bore you any further with exploring the last two options returned by our control panel “font” search word, suffice it to say they are equally useless.

So where the hell do you change the size or type or fonts used in Windows? Searching for it helps not, neither does common logic. Well, stupid, how dumb are you? Use your brain! It’s “Control Panel”, then “Appearance and Personalization”, then “Personalize”, then “Window Color”, then “Advanced Appearance Settings”! You should know that fonts are a type of window color! Sheeesh…

As mindbafflingly stupid that user interaction has been designed, luckily I haven’t spend enough time here yet to stumble upon other equally retarded annoyances. If I had, I’d probably be smoking crack right now trying to calm my nerves.

I have, on the other hand, just experience the glorious genius of the “Recommended” and default settings for automatic updates. The epic fail quality of the genius is two-fold, the first one destroying your work, the second one potentially destroying your computer. Please read on.

1) The default behavior is to download updates, install them, and restart the computer. Just. Like. That.

Don’t leave that thing unattended if you were actually doing something important before picking up the phone, checking how the dinner was coming along, taking a trip to the crapper, or anything other that normal people do every once in a while.

Windows 7 seems to say,

“Hey, there’s these purdy important updates that I needs to gets. I’m just gonna install those for ya, then I’m gonna be restarting, but never you worry, once I’m back, all dem Explory windows is gonna be aaaalll right back, see?”

“Sure, alright, but what about that Windows AIK instance that was open with all my changes to the WIM that I’d been preparing that I wanted to export once I had finished it?”

“Oooh, you needed that? Really? It’s just… You weren’t there, so I figured…”

“Yeah, that’s fantastic, great! What about the x264 process that was running along transcoding at 4 hours, with 4 more hours to finish? You gonna bring that back, too?”

“Uh, well, see, I kinda figured that wasn’t important, seeing as how it was just using pretty much all the CPU. Ya know, it kinda looked like a runaway process and all…”

“Or, an intensively hard-working process, not to be disturbed? Well, one final question. The Putty instance with an open SSH connection to my Kubuntu box where I was running an SFV batch process on 1.2 TB of data in the session that was killed when you rebooted my computer… I’d like to see you bring that back?”

2) Believe it or not, but the automatic updates are also triggered when sleeping. That is, when your laptop’s sleeping, not the flatline brain activity kind of sleep that is the logic behind Windows 7′s automatic updates. Yes, that’s right. This entire process can and will happen when you’ve put your computer into sleep mode. That means do a little work, close the lid so your laptop sleeps, and stow it away. Someplace safe, like where you’d usually put it. Like a carrying bag or sleeve. You know the kind that obstructs air intake? The kind you’d never dream of putting you laptop in if it were on? Because if you did, you’d probably end up damaging it severely as it overheats until the battery’s drained, or the CPU or some other vital component like the graphics card fries and shuts it down? Yup, this is the comfy cramped little place your laptop would suddenly awaken to install updates and do a reboot. A reboot which could end anyplace, really. At a BIOS password prompt, for instance. A boot manager screen. A hard drive encryption password prompt, or simply the login prompt of your favorite window manager.

So thank you, Microsoft, for once again proving that stupidity comes in many forms. Oh, and for still not having fixed the auto-hiding task bar so that overlapping windows actually don’t get to be placed on top of it. But of course, it’s only been 15 years since that issue was first reported. And it’s not like the other operating systems don’t have that same problem. Oh yeah, sorry, that’s right, they don’t.