Win XP, Not so dumb, Not so smart.

Normally I try to avoid discussions that tend to toward Windows Vs Linux, or Windows Vs Apple OSX, or any of that. I think that they all end up the same.


Just for the record my opinion is as follows...
If you enjoy playing Games, have a Windows partition.
If you enjoy playing with computers and like free software, have a Linux partition.
If you don't fall into either of these categories, go with Windows.
If you're an impressionable idiot who thinks that everything is suddenly the best thing ever, then needless to say, Apple OSX is what you want. Don't worry if you can't afford it, get a second mortgage. Don't worry, you'll be cool in the end.



But what I want to discuss today is the Windows XP Start Menu. Microsoft tend to get most things pretty decent in terms of usability, but this one really annoys me. In XP they have a habit of hiding things that you haven't used recently. For example, the word menu will hide options such as Print, Page Setup etc if you haven't used them. I don't find this useful or usable. The real culprit is the start menu...


As you can see, If I want to start a program I click Start->Programs, and have four options. Accessories is there because I use MS Paint a lot for screenshots. Other than that, the last things I did on my computer were have a chat, watch a dvd , and burn a cd. Windows its figures that its safe to assume thats all I'll be doing. Wrong.

So, I click to expand and get the following monstrosity...


What you see here is all my programs, in no particular categories, or order. Well, thats not entirely true. The first group (From Accessories to WinRAR) are in alpabetical order. The remainder of the list is in chronological order. So, if I want to find Gimp, I should remember that it wasn't part of the default install, and that I installed Gimp after Championship Manager(Thats the Eidos link) but before jEdit.

Now I am sure someone will point out that there are ways to tell Windows to reorder the menu alphabetically, but my question is Why should I have to?To give you an impression of the ways other Desktop Systems do this, have a look at the following...

1) Gnome (My favourite Desktop)

Note how everything is grouped properly, and each submenu is in alphabetical order.
Of course, KDE does it differently...


They sort by most used, so everything is in the order it is most frequently used. They also include a Most Used section at the top of the menu for ultra quick access I guess.


I'm not one to give out about Microsoft in general, after all they did manage to create the world most popular desktop operating system, and effectively made their own market, and monopolised it through good products and excellent business decisions. But when anyone gets things wrong in my opinion, I'll say so.

(Side note: Neither of these screenshots are my desktop, Can someone please tell me how to get a screenshot of the start menu in Gnome? Taking screenshots is easy, but getting the start menu to stay popped up at the same time is hard. )

(Update, Thanks to a comment from Niall, I found out how to do it. GIMP will allow you to take screenshots with a time delay, so here is my own start menu)