My wife and I have taken to calling our child ‘The Wa-Wa’ because whenever he is awake, it seems like he is crying. Maybe I should be called ‘The Wa-Wa Senior’ for all the whining I do in this blog about how bad Windows Vista is. But that’s just it, it is really, really bad, and while in many ways it is a general, though modest, improvement over Windows XP, it seems that in many more ways it is a honkin’-huge-Jolly-Green-Giant step backwards. Yesterday, I was confronted with another of Vista’s backslides that makes me want to kick Microsoft in the backside (har!).
For those of you who may be (blessedly) unfamiliar, Windows Vista installs the components for every available feature (like Movie Maker, Media Center, etc), whether you want them or not. This is all fine and good, but instead of the add/remove programs control panel that has a tab for adding and removing Windows components in Windows XP, Vista has a Windows Features control panel that lets you turn individual features on or off. Think about that not-so-subtle shift in nomenclature while you read on.
I happen to need Vista for another development project I’m working on at the moment. I run it on my Mac under VMWare Fusion with 30GB of storage allocated to it. Since the only additional software I need on the system is Visual Studio and the source code for the project, 30GB should be more than enough space, right? Well… Let’s just say that when moving some test data around, space was getting tight. The obvious thing to do would be to get rid of those pre-installed programs that I don’t use (who in there right mind would use Movie Maker over iMovie anyway?).
If you were paying attention to the second paragraph, you have probably figured out by now that turning a Windows Vista feature ‘off’ does not actually remove it from the system. Nope, it just takes away access to that feature but leaves the files on your computer’s hard drive. What’s funny, in a hammering a six-inch steel spike through my skull sort of way, is that turning off simple features that should not need any complicated reconfiguration, such as games, can take up to a minute. Seriously! Vista can actually spend the better part of sixty seconds removing a freakin’ link from the Programs menu. Boy the wow sure starts now on that one — as in ‘Wow, this operating system sucks!’
Back to the problem at hand. What do you do if you want to get rid of these ‘features’ that you don’t use so you can free up space on the hard drive? You can’t do it through Vista’s control panel, so maybe deleting the files directly is the way to go? Slow down, Mac user. That thought is a little too close to making sense for Microsoft and therefore dangerous and must be beaten out of you.
You see, Windows has a concept called the registry, which can conceptually be thought of as eight pounds of over-cooked vermicelli all tangled up and left to dry out in the sun for forty straight days. Each strand represents an application and the points where it is fused together with other bits of hardened pasta represent all of the ‘keys’ in the registry that somehow refer to that app. The trick is to get the strand that represents the application you want to remove out of the hardened ball without leaving any pieces of it behind or disturbing anything else. If you are not successful in this endeavor, Windows will get its hate on and seek to punish you (repeatedly) for dipping your fork in its lunch.
Even if I was willing to waste my time blowing away all traces of each and every one of these applications from the registry and then manually deleting them from the disk, there’s a fair chance that the next OS update would put some of them back or worse, flat out break the operating system (I’ve experienced both of these scenarios under Windows XP). Yes, there are third party tools and scripts available that can automate the removal of these components, but they often come from dubious sources and do the job with questionable results. Even if they did work flawlessly, I shouldn’t have to resort to this type of computer jujitsu just to remove unwanted applications that come bundled as a part of the OS.
Thanks, Microsoft. Thanks again for making each day I spend with Vista suck just a little bit more than the day before.
