Your top ten computer annoyances

[etnlIcarus]

YouTube crashing randomly with FF 3.0. Thankfully there was a fix I found here involving installing Adobe Flash 10 beta. Yay!

Oh, you lucky sod. I upgraded to 10 beta for the same reason but it still crashes.

[jakupl]

1. when my computer is standing in the sun... it makes me nervous

[screamingturnip]

1. when my computer is standing in the sun... it makes me nervous

did you put ubuntu on an Asimo?

[jakupl]

did you put ubuntu on an Asimo?

haha ok. "is in the sun"

[Trail]

I though while reading this that I was pretty tolerant, then I saw this. Taskbar autohide. I HATE it. Kill it with fire. Please.

I hate HPUX. Nothing works. Every command I want to use it not there. Those that are, have stupid flags, or missing flags I need altogether. Thank god they are abandoning it for Linux...

Also, I quite hate telneting to specific machines when you lose some keyboard buttons (I mean, backspace doesn't work so you need to press Ctrl-H, up arrow does not change to previous command in history, and the like).

I hate it when (eventually) I use windows, and try to mouse-scroll on an inactive window and it doesn't work. And I spend like 5 seconds wondering why.

[Tundro Walker]

My frustrations are mostly software-related ...

* Progress Meters that just roll to denote action without actually racking up progress. Vista (and lazy programmers) are notorious for this crap.

* Computers getting exponentially faster, but still seem just as slow.

* It's the 21st century, but computers still have the occasional random slowdown, lockup, etc.

* Majority of purchasable software these days seems to be defective-by-design (you have to wait for 2nd or 3rd patch before it finally works right) (This problem is usually caused by unrealistic development deadlines caused by publishing companies. EG: get that game out by Christmas, whether it works or not.)

* On that same note, I'm sick of vendors selling a new "version" of their software when it's really just the old version with much-needed bug fixes applied.

* On, on the same note again, vendors who shuffle around their user interface to make their "new" product seem different, when all it's really done is just ruined the mental model the user had of the product, causing a ton of retraining to get used to the new interface.

* Vendors (like Microsoft) that keep adding more and more stupid features to their software that nobody gives a crap about just so they can justify selling a new version

* Vendors (like Microsoft) that charge YOU for tech-support to fix THEIR defective product

* Hardware vendors that can't seem to agree on a standard (hence all this driver fiasco BS)

* Hardware that's defective out of the box (EG: I used to swear by Logitech, but the last two items I got from them I had to take back due to defect)

* Programming languages all want to re-invent the wheel by creating their own syntax using different characters which do the same damn thing. EG: SQL is a supposed ANSI standard, but MS uses % as a wild card for SQL SERVER, while they use * as a wild card for MS Access SQL. Java uses // to comment out lines while VB uses '. They use braces {}, brackets [] or parenthesis () to pretty much do the same thing. It's freaking annoying.

[Dale61]

I've really only got the one annoyance now, and it has everything to do with PEBKAC errors.

[etnlIcarus]

* Vendors (like Microsoft) that keep adding more and more stupid features to their software that nobody gives a crap about just so they can justify selling a new version

The unfortunate truth here is MS don't even try to justify the purchase of the new version of their OS anymore. Instead, they spread FUD against their own old OS, while simultaneously making it difficult to legally attain a copy of that old version OS.

I think Windows feature bloat has more to do with many of Redmond's divisions being bored and having nothing better to do while the core devs rewrote Windows from the inside out. It's just a shame the improvements get buried under the rest of the crap.

[Dixon Bainbridge]

Proprietary standards. Now there's an oxymoron.

[timzak]

My frustrations are mostly software-related ...

* Progress Meters that just roll to denote action without actually racking up progress. Vista (and lazy programmers) are notorious for this crap.

Ha! Good one. As much as I like Antivir free AV program, I always notice during a system scan that it spends half the scanning time progressing from 0% to 99%, then spends the other half of the time getting from 99% to done.