Why does windows suck so much?

I have found a brilliant little freeware application to add watermarks to my photos. It is called FastStone Photo Resizer.

I have a very nice picture of the moon setting over Tablemountain. Got this the other morning before leaving for work.

But talking about work, one of my colleagues started a list of his reasons he doesn't understand Windows. ( and doesn't like it)

I got his permission to put this online and get some more feedback.
Here is his list:


FTP via Explorer

Copy 13KB of files over a 64kbit link (7KB per second).
Should take 2-3 seconds to copy the files.

Explorer pops up a window saying "Calculating time to transfer files"
This takes 5 seconds.

Then it pops up the copy dialog, with 20 seconds remaining
at the bottom. Copy takes 2 seconds.

Explorer spent more time working out how long it's going to take,
and still gets it wrong.

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Microsoft Outlook brings up an unknown error. The Operating System,
E-mail client and Mail Server are all written by the same company. There
is no component in the whole configuration which is not by Microsoft. But
the applications still don't know what's going on.

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When you synchronize to an NTP server, it brings up a message saying it got
the correct time from the server, but the time displayed as the time of the
message is still the wrong time. If they get the correct time, why not use it?

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I have a removable drive. When I've finished copying files on to it in the
afternoon, I uninstall it from Windows and take it out. The following morning,
a message window pops up, saying Windows was unable to write to E:\Mft$ (which is
God knows what). Why not write everything when the device is uninstalled? Why
wait hours to figure it out? What is E:\Mft$?

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.NET Terrarium is a DotNET terrarium simulation. I thought it would be wonderful
to try out, and consequently learn C#. The Dotnet installer blue-screens my Windows
2000 Pro. I tried this twice. After the second time, it worked. Now I have a Firewall
message popping up every once in a while that Terrarium was unable to connect to a
Terrarium server. Why is the client running when I don't want it to. Then I noticed that
I have a new Terrarium screen saver, which I don't want. That's what's trying to phone
home to Microsoft. My screen saver.

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Microsoft Outlook sometimes spends hours synchronizing. It delays reminders. I've seen
reminders pop up 5 HOURS after the meeting, and I didn't even know there was a problem.

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Microsoft Outlook Express - You notice that you're low on space, so you select a bunch of
e-mails and press delete. Outlook Express promptly tells that you it didn't have enough space
to delete the items, but maybe I'm expecting too much.

On a similar note, you can run out of space when moving items from one folder to another,
because it first copies the whole lot to the new folder, and then afterwards deletes the
old ones.

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I go into the RECYCLER directory on a drive, and notice a few folders, which I don't need.
I press delete and it says "Do you want to delete these folders to the recycle bin? Yes/No?".
I'm not sure why there are two options, since I do know those folders won't be deleted no matter
which option I choose.

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I get a brand-new PC, with Windows XP Professional SP 2 installed from CD, all shiny sparkling new.
Explorer crashes a few hours after I boot. I don't understand how it ever made it out the door.

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I put my USB flash drive into Windows XP, and browse to a folder. Windows pops up a message saying
"Please insert the second disk in this multi-zip folder" or something similar. It doesn't say
which zip file is multi-disk. I didn't ask it to open any zip files. So now I first have to press
escape before I can go on.

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Windows allows other applications to pop up Windows over what you're doing now. So I can be in
the middle of typing something and just as I'm about to press enter, a window pops up. I press enter,
the window disappears. I have no idea what it was or what I just said okay to. Yes, you can argue
that this is a poorly written application popping up, but Microsoft can prevent it from just
displaying and do that flashing thing in the taskbar. That only works sometimes obviously.

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Microsoft Outlook sends these magical winmail.dat attachments which only Microsoft Outlook can open.

I've received e-mail from people, and I use Microsoft Outlook Express, and it doesn't work. I don't
understand how they can break a simple thing like sending an attachment along with an e-mail.