Top 10: Most futile Windows features

With the release of Windows 8 on the horizon, there’s plenty of excitement about what features the latest Microsoft operating system will introduce, particularly the glossy new Metro user interface. It fills the screen with content, dispensing with window frames, borders, menus and other controls; there’s already debate about whether it’s an innovation that’ll change the way we use our desktop or a step too far away from the traditional mouse-pointer and menu interface we’re all familiar with. While we wait for the revolution to happen, we’ve compiled a list of some of Microsoft’s less distinguished innovations.

10. Windows Update

We’ll be the first to tell you that it’s important to keep Windows up-to-date. Window Updates help protect your PC against security flaws, provide your operating system with the tools it needs to defend against security threats and fixes all those little bugs that emerge through the lifetime of your software.

However, there’s nothing more annoying than being forced to reboot your PC when you’re in the middle of something. It’s not uncommon for games to be yanked out of a fire-fight by an alert prompt (above) informing you that the computer absolutely insists on being restarted at some point in the next four hours. We’re happy to update our PC, but we’d at least like the option of being told that an update will be installed at the next reboot and left to do it in our own good time. Currently the only workaround involves meddling with your registry in ways that many users are less than entirely comfortable with.

9. Flip 3D

Flip 3D is what happens when you press the Windows key + tab in Windows Vista or 7. Pressing tab again allows you to move from one window to the next, providing a glossy alternative to the alt + tab window-switching interface. It looked cool in the advert and looks like it should be useful in real life, but have you ever seen anyone use it? Did you even remember that it existed until we just reminded you?

8. Active Desktop

Microsoft introduced Active Desktop in the good old days, when geeks were geeks and the internet was a wild frontier; the late ’90s, in other words. Active Desktop was designed to integrate your web experience with your desktop, keeping headlines and other web content permanently on-screen and putting you within a mouse click of your favourite news and entertainment websites.

It was in some ways a remarkably prescient move, anticipating the way that modern users do most of their computing inside their browser. Unfortunately, Microsoft neglected the fact that almost everyone was on dial-up internet that charged by the minute and also failed to curb Active Desktop’s hunger for system resources. The heritage of Active Desktop continued to generate on-screen clutter for decades to come in the form of the Windows Sidebar, Desktop Gadgets and other pointless widgets.

7. OneCare

Microsoft’s OneCare wasn’t a Windows component per se, and that’s exactly what was wrong with it. Although it was sold – for the better part of £30 a year – as a comprehensive anti-virus and system care package for windows, it lacked even a basic email scanner and performed remarkably poorly.

Our last review of OneCare generously credited it with a low price and excellent Windows integration but noted that it was let down by “slow loading speeds and awful performance in our malware prevention and removal tests” – the very things that you rely on your anti-virus software to do. Microsoft ceased selling it in June 2009, replacing it with Microsoft Security Essentials, which is free and has performed significantly better in our anti-virus tests.

6. Windows Genuine Advantage

No company wants to see its profits devastated by piracy, so it’s unsurprising that – after years of poorly secured releases – Microsoft decided to take steps to ensure that users would not only have to use original software but would be alerted if they did not, helping to curb the sales of counterfeit copies of the OS.

Unfortunately, Windows Genuine Advantage, the security authentication system introduced in Windows XP, had a distressing tendency to decide that a legitimate installation of the operating system was in fact bootlegged, leaving users stuck with limited product updates and nagging messages informing them that “you may be a victim of software counterfeiting”, a problem that was at one time particularly prevalent if you upgraded hardware components such as your motherboard.

Also controversial is WGA’s “spyware-like” behaviour of phoning home to Microsoft’s servers, initially on a daily basis, but current versions only check back every two weeks. WGA still exists in Windows 7, but years of development and complaints have smoothed its rough edges, making it a less annoying and controversial product all-round.

5. Rover

Otherwise known as “that stupid search dog from Windows XP”, Rover came to Windows from Microsoft’s even more annoying Bob. In XP’s original default settings, Rover would come trotting out on to the search panel every time you tried to search for anything using Windows Explorer. Not only was Rover annoying, patronising and hideously unprofessional looking, but we never quite managed to shake the irrational feeling that his very presence was somehow slowing our search times. Strangely enough, while researching this, we found a handful of posts from people who wanted to get Rover back on to their search pane. However, the rest of the world tends to agree that this is one puppy that should stay lost.

4. Windows force quit

In this case we’re more annoyed by the absence of an application than by an application itself. If a program stops responding, Mac users have the Force Quit option and Linux users get XKill, which closes any unresponsive window you choose to click on. Windows users, however, are still stuck with either right-clicking on the application’s taskbar icon and selecting close – which often doesn’t work if the application is genuinely unresponsive – or by pressing Ctrl + Alt +Del, selecting Task Manager and then using that to terminate the application once you’re allowed back to your desktop. Hardly convenient.

3. DriveSpace

In the dark days of MS-DOS and even Windows 9x, disk space was often at a premium as users’ hunger for application and data storage outstripped the capacity of the tiny and expensive hard disks of the time.

DriveSpace, originally named DoubleSpace, was a disk compression utility designed to stuff extra data into your available disk space, although the exact level of compression possible varied. It worked much as any other compression utility, but instead of zipping up a few files, it acted on your entire hard disk. A special driver, launched at boot time, allowed the compressed data to be extracted on the fly.

Unfortunately, DriveSpace was incompatible with some software, including many games that required their own specialist boot disk and configuration. It also consumed a great deal of memory, which meant that you couldn’t run memory-intensive applications.

These issues, along with widely-publicised reports of data loss and a general lack of faith in the underlying compression technology meant that DriveSpace was soon abandoned. Given that we now consider a 500GB hard disk to be slightly on the small side, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever need full-disk compression again.

2. User Account Control

Home users first got UAC in Windows Vista. Designed to prevent programs from being installed and settings changed without permission from an administrator account, it helped both to prevent malware from taking hold on a PC without the user’s knowledge and to keep unprivileged users (kids, flatmates, particularly precocious cats) from doing anything devastating to your system.

Unfortunately, most users – ourselves included – found its default settings to be overly paranoid, asking approval for even the most minor of actions, and often producing several pop-ups during the installation of a single software package. Because of its irritation value, some users simply disabled it, entirely negating its usefulness as a security measure. Fortunately, Windows 7’s implementation of UAC is significantly less chatty, only prompting you to approve higher-risk activities such as the installation of software without a digital security signature.

1. Windows Me

OK, not so much a feature as a catalogue of disaster. Microsoft’s crowning moment of failure was perhaps Windows Millennium Edition, abbreviated as Me. Released in 2000 and designed to supplant still-popular Windows 98, Windows Me in fact removed as many features as it updated, including real mode MS-DOS (a move to improve boot performance, but dramatically reducing the operating system’s flexibility) and utilities that were considered too business-like for the new OS’s intended home audience, including Active Directory client services, Poledit and Microsoft Personal Web Server.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, upgrading users were more than a bit miffed to find that their new operating system actually did less than the one they’d upgraded from, and it barely lasted a year before being superseded by Windows XP. Windows 2000, the NT-based professional operating system released alongside Me proved to have significantly greater longevity.