Well, even Windows 7 has its shortcomings. I’ll not list them here (feel free to do so in comments *heh*). It is still the est thing M$ has done in quite a long while, and easily Good Enough for most uses, good enough, in fact, to supplant Ubuntu (in any flavor, including the attractive and full-featured Mint) as my daily use OS for most uses. That’s going some.
But still, some rough edges, and so M$ has made an effort to make it more secure with a better update process (though still not as good as some ‘nix distros manage… most of the time), th free Microsoft Security Essentials (which is pretty good) and…
Microsoft Fixit, a website devoted to some easily-run fixes for Windows annoyances. It’s actually pretty useful. Surprise, surprise. 🙂 Of course, when I visited the place recently using the (very) new Opera 11 beta, which is very, very, very good in almost all respects, I noticed that Microsofties aren’t the only ones who can have bugs slip in from time to time:
*heh*
I only have two complaints about Win 7.
1) Issues with DRM and DVD playback in Media Center. Sometimes a DVD will stutter or play without sound for 10 seconds and then I’ll get an error message saying “files needed to display video are not installed properly” or some such rubbish. I have to exit Media Center and restart it to get past the error message. If I press STOP before the error message and press PLAY a second time the DVD plays fine.
2) When I hit the calculator button on my keyboard the calculator application launches, but it’s underneath all open windows. What’s the point of having a hotkey if I still have to grab my mouse to get to what the hotkey launched?
I hate DRM. For your issue, you might look into what codecs are installed and see about updating them. A pain (and Windows 7 should do that sort of thing “automagically” IMO, but doesn’t really), but could help.
“What’s the point of having a hotkey if I still have to grab my mouse to get to what the hotkey launched?” Yeh, it’s a pain. Better workaround than mousing to it is to ALT+TAB (or WinKey+TAB), IMO. I suspect it’s an idiosyncratic issue, though. My Win7 comps’ calculator hotkeys always bring Calc up on top of what is currently running. Config of your keyboard’s hotkey software perhaps? My MS Wireless 3000, for example, doesn’t have anything to specify loading apps invoked by hotkeys to the front, but it does so anyway.
These kinds of niggling little devils are irritating, though.
BTW, despite the lil bug in Opera noted in the graphic above (and, frankly, it’s not a bug in O-11 itself but in an extension–that new feature that’s still not proven itself useful in Opera 11, IMO), I’m really, really liking some of the features of Opera 11. For example, I have 57 tabs open in this window of O-11, but 18 of them are collapsed in “stacks”. Hover over the stack, select the thumbnail I want, bob’s your uncle. Favicons are easily discerned in the remaining unstacked tabs and thumbnail views–an Opera feature for quite some time now–work for them too, of course. Really easy to manage a relatively large number of open tabs this way.
I really (REALLY) like the “Enable plugins only on demand” switch. Sooo nice. A “new features” list here is mostly spot on.
So I wonder how it would have translated from the original Maori.
You know, Perri, I probably ought to allow that the next time it happens, just for kicks.