Now as you all know, I love Microsoft Windows. I have used it and its predecessor DOS since the early 1980s (yes, I’m old); its evolution over the years has been little short of amazing. And of course I worked for Microsoft here in the Pacific Northwest for a decade and a half.
That said.
I have a number of everyday gripes that I just wish Microsoft would fix for once and for all. None of these are, in my view as a software developer of fifty years’ standing (wow) appear very difficult – so please, team, just fix them!
In no particular order:
Make Authenticator Work With Apple Watch
Unlike my younger comrades, my iPhone is not an appendage to my body. Often (real often) I’m at my PC and some account times out, I have to type in the magic number and…where did I leave my phone?
I imagine there’s some Bluetooth security issue with making it work on the watch, but why can’t we fix it?
Let Outlook and Teams Share Identities
How many times have you had to sign into your email account (using Authenticator) and moments later had to repeat the process with Teams?
This feels like the relevant engineering groups have to have a meeting. Just saying.
Settings and Control Panel
Just this morning I was attempting to move the default location of Windows Update from C: to D:. It’s not clear this is even possible, but searching for answers yields any number of inconsistent results – because with nearly every release of Windows some Settings move, change, are deleted, or move from Control Panel to Settings, or whatever.
Dear Microsoft: rid of Control Panel for once and for all. Or Settings. Whatever. And then don’t change the UI. Ever.
Sound: Part 1
Save the last volume setting and don’t reset it to the super-loud default for no apparent reason. Every time I load Teams or YouTube Windows blasts my ears.
Sound: Part 2
This one’s a bit esoteric but applies, I imagine to any musician attempting to use Windows. I play the pipe organ (badly) and use Hauptwerk. There’s a known issue with the Windows Audio subsystem in which input from MIDI keyboards is batched – which means when you press a key there’s noticeable latency. It makes Windows essentially unusable for MIDI (music) devices unless you buy external hardware (I use an inexpensive Presonus AudioBox).
This works with no issue on a Mac – should be easy to fix on Windows.
Clean Up the C: Drive
I’ve complained about this before. Microsoft installs apps on C:\Program Files, C:\Program Files (x86), C:\Users\You\AppData (and three folders within)…why? (And \AppData is hidden!) Macs just have /Applications. It’s a mess.
Moreover: there’s so much junk on the C: drive, some of it from Microsoft, a lot of it from vendors – like the 13GB (!) installer for my keyboard and mouse from Razer. There are .DMP files, log files that never get purged or deleted but rather grow forever, literally occupying tens of gigabytes of space. Microsoft should develop and enforce rules about how the C: drive is used. It’s the Wild West now.
What Changed?
Because I have a relatively small C: drive (256GB SSD) I keep an eye on free space (I wrote my own df command-line app to report free space.)
One day I have 13GB free. Another 8GB. Then 4GB, 2GB. Then 10GB. Why? What changed? (It wasn’t a Windows Update.)
I use the invaluable Wiztree to report on disk usage but it doesn’t show what changed from one day to the next. And I would like to know – and control – when and where the downloads happen.
Why Is It Slow?
Recently on my machine (an i9 with 64GB RAM with up to date antivirus) that old reliable Ctrl-Alt-Del app Task Manager takes forever to load. And sometimes (like right now) it displays the white “(Not responding” title bar).
Why? Not even Bing Chat or ChatGPT can help, other than to give some banal and useless advice.
Ultimately I’d really like to know What My Machine Is Doing, and have the tools to (easily) dive down to the bit level. I fear, however, that’s a whole new OS rewritten from scratch.