Getting frustrated with Windows Part 1

I often get a bit frustrated with my Windows XP box at the office. If you ever worked productively with any other OS (e.g. Mac OSX or Linux) you will probably understand my anger.

And today, after another frustrating moment with windows, I decided to document some highlights.
Here is what I got today:

Scenario:
I was a bit playing with JSP and Servlets. Then I wanted to search the file called servlet.jar on my hard disk.
So I clicked (WinKey) + F, and the search dialog appeared.

But know lets’ hold on for a while.
One question: Why is the shortcut for Search “(WinKey) + F“?
OK, let’s continue with the search (or find?) window.

I typed in “servlet.jar” and hit the Search button.

…waiting…
… 98 % CPU …
… waiting …

And now there is my question Nr. 2: Why can I search the web in milliseconds, and I have to wait for a local search a few minutes?

… waiting …
—snip—

Here it comes:
After minutes I got the following screen:

jre.png

What the heck are those forward slashes? Where is the path “sample/jnlp/servlet” on my XP box???

So I did what every user would have done in that case, I right-clicked and selected properties.
Here is what I got:

props.png

Wow! This helped really! This was the information that I wanted.
It’s in a compressed file (as I thought), but where is this compressed file?
Why are files searched within compressed items? I never set such an option.

So I tried to turn off the option to search for compressed files (I turned off the zip functionality in XP already, but that’s a different story…).
Here is screen 3:

searchopt.png

There is no option to turn this **** off (BTW: Nice dialog, nice scroll bar….).
That was too much for my nerves. I stopped.
But here is something for your homework: try to click at “Other search options”.

And finally (at the time writing this blog entry) I got the classic hidden feature in XP: TADA – “The Open Programs Multi-line-Scrollbar”:

scroll.png

Now I need a break.

Feed validator

Something went wrong with my rss and atom feeds on this blog. After the Movable Type update, some of the old entries were corrupted, because they contain Umlauts. And so the feeds broke. I first thought there was an error with the templates, but they were ok. Finally I found this Feed Validator which pointed me to the error.
I fixed the old entries and now everything works ok again…