Anthony Milner

Earlier in the year Craig Bailey posted a tip on his blog for Fixing the annoying Vista Windows Explorer View quirk. [side note - Craig has a great blog which covers all things Microsoft. I also am lucky enough to say that I work with Craig at Elcom but unfortunately not for much longer he is leaving us to pursue some new challenges and I wish him all the best with his new endeavours.] Back to the quirk – everytime you open a folder in Vista it resets to either thumbnail, detailed or list view with no memory for set preferences. My fav is detail view which I reset many times throughout the day – I’m sure it only adds about 1 minute of wasted time to my day but that’s not the point – it’s annoying and it should just work.

Well I finally got around to fixing it using the information posted on Craig’s blog and it’s made me so happy that I felt compelled to pass on the tip. How Microsoft let such a simple feature slip past their testing not to mention the lack of a fix in SP1 is odd. Vista is a nice OS but it’s the small things which create negative perception. I’m often surprised by the number of people I know in a wide variety of industries that look at my PC and say “how did you get your PC to look like that?” and I respond “oh that’s Vista” and they reply “really? It looks pretty cool, is it as bad as they say?”.

It will probably take years for MS to fully recover from the not-so-great release of Vista and as a result the next version called Windows 7 will most likely be viewed with great skepticism. I think we may look back on Vista as the tipping point for the end of bloated operating systems as we’ve known them to date, but that’s a story for another post.