Why I (heart) Vista, Part 1
Today, I discovered another reason why I love Windows Vista, and we shall start our "Why I (heart) Vista" series of blog posts with this little example.
I was happily at work, doing the same thing I have done at work using Vista for the last 1-2 weeks.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a message box pops up with a message along the lines of 'An application is trying to send you a message from the desktop.' My options were something like 'view' and 'later'. My response was something like, "ummm, what?" After realising I had no frickin idea what it was talking about, I decided to click view, or ok, or whatever it was.
And my screen goes blank! Completely black! I was confused. This is not normal behaviour for a windows computer. Normally they crash, not turn themselves or the monitor off. At first I had thought it was another one of those "Administrator access" situations, where the monitor goes blank for a fraction of a second. But after a fraction of a second and no picture I started to wonder. After a few seconds I was vaguely worried. I was about to start investigating restarting the computer when after about 6 seconds it came back on. 6 seconds may not seem like a long time, but try actually waiting for 6 seconds and it is a long time when you were in the middle of something and your monitor goes blank. Anyway, it finally got round to showing me the message, in some funny greyed out mode - I didn't really pay much attention. It was the message from my virus protection program saying it had updated its database. This message shows up at this time every morning, but for some reason today it involved this bizarre windows rigmarole. Normally it just pops up like a normal message box. Or maybe it sits in the start bar and flashes. Something normal anyway.
So I was like, ok, that's not that interesting, and went to click ok (or continue or whatever). It didn't work! I click again. I click all over the place, I think it has frozen or something, I realise it is reacting as if I was clicking the "subordinate" mouse button, the one that is normally the right click. Because I normally have the mouse buttons swapped round in left-handed mode. So, I am clicking what is for me the "dominant" button, but it thinks it is the "subordinate" button. Because, for fun, it has swapped them back over for the purpose of me interacting with this message in the grey void. So I press ok with the other mouse button and after a half second and a screen flicker, everything goes back to normal.
So:
I was happily at work, doing the same thing I have done at work using Vista for the last 1-2 weeks.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a message box pops up with a message along the lines of 'An application is trying to send you a message from the desktop.' My options were something like 'view' and 'later'. My response was something like, "ummm, what?" After realising I had no frickin idea what it was talking about, I decided to click view, or ok, or whatever it was.
And my screen goes blank! Completely black! I was confused. This is not normal behaviour for a windows computer. Normally they crash, not turn themselves or the monitor off. At first I had thought it was another one of those "Administrator access" situations, where the monitor goes blank for a fraction of a second. But after a fraction of a second and no picture I started to wonder. After a few seconds I was vaguely worried. I was about to start investigating restarting the computer when after about 6 seconds it came back on. 6 seconds may not seem like a long time, but try actually waiting for 6 seconds and it is a long time when you were in the middle of something and your monitor goes blank. Anyway, it finally got round to showing me the message, in some funny greyed out mode - I didn't really pay much attention. It was the message from my virus protection program saying it had updated its database. This message shows up at this time every morning, but for some reason today it involved this bizarre windows rigmarole. Normally it just pops up like a normal message box. Or maybe it sits in the start bar and flashes. Something normal anyway.
So I was like, ok, that's not that interesting, and went to click ok (or continue or whatever). It didn't work! I click again. I click all over the place, I think it has frozen or something, I realise it is reacting as if I was clicking the "subordinate" mouse button, the one that is normally the right click. Because I normally have the mouse buttons swapped round in left-handed mode. So, I am clicking what is for me the "dominant" button, but it thinks it is the "subordinate" button. Because, for fun, it has swapped them back over for the purpose of me interacting with this message in the grey void. So I press ok with the other mouse button and after a half second and a screen flicker, everything goes back to normal.
So:
- 4 seconds to register weird message box and try and work out what it is talking about
- 6 seconds to wait for blank monitor
- 1/2 second to recognise virus software message and to try and dismiss the message box
- 3 sconds to try and use the mouse
- and finally 1/2 second to swap back over to normal mode again
Comments
There is going to be a lot of "my computer did something strange and now I can't find my thesis..." happening in the not too distant future