Windows 7 & Classic Start Menu ?

[MagicAndre1981]

sorry, if you are intolerant against improvements change your job so that you're no longer confronted with new things. If all people would think like you we would still sits in caves

[amigafan]

sorry with the old menu have to do more clicks to get the programs open

Wrong. My StartMenu in XP needs 2 click to launch anything.

You're only intolerant in having new ideas. I hope they never bring those old, stupid startmenu back.

That's because we know that new doesn't necessarily mean better.

[Yzöwl]

<snip>But now we have to think twice and look around to find stuff. And I also wouldn't bet my a** that it's fewer clicks in this new and "improved" interface. Oh yeah and what's next to stop booting and select Safe mode you'll have to press CTRL+Shift+B for example. That's wrong. It's ok to make inovations without it there would never be any progress but still why to change something what is working perfectly. Sorry to all, just had to say something in the name of those who obviously know something and have been bothered by the ignorant.

The world is changing, people in every job are required to constantly adapt regardlesss of whether that change is in their opinion unnecessary or wrong.

In this case you aren't being asked to change overnight, you've got a golden opportunity to begin to adapt now through beta, then release and a considerable length of time on top of that as required before upgading all of your systems to the new OS.

You don't have to adapt, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the 'kids with small experience in windows administration' will and take your job as a result.

[DeathNACan]

<snip>But now we have to think twice and look around to find stuff. And I also wouldn't bet my a** that it's fewer clicks in this new and "improved" interface. Oh yeah and what's next to stop booting and select Safe mode you'll have to press CTRL+Shift+B for example. That's wrong. It's ok to make inovations without it there would never be any progress but still why to change something what is working perfectly. Sorry to all, just had to say something in the name of those who obviously know something and have been bothered by the ignorant.

The world is changing, people in every job are required to constantly adapt regardless of whether that change is in their opinion unnecessary or wrong.

In this case you aren't being asked to change overnight, you've got a golden opportunity to begin to adapt now through beta, then release and a considerable length of time on top of that as required before upgrading all of your systems to the new OS.

You don't have to adapt, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the 'kids with small experience in windows administration' will and take your job as a result.

The entire point is not about change. It's about forced change and not being given options. It's about unnecessary changes made for marketing purposes just to convince the consumer that they have something new. It's about too much change at one time and the effect they have on everyone from the IT professional to the home user. No one is against innovation and anyone who works in IT knows you have to keep up. This is the same old argument that has been around for a long time. For the most part, on one side you have a lot of programmers, developers and wanna-be power users. On the other side you have IT support professionals such as Network Administrators, PC Technicians, and Support Personnel.

The IT support group understands that change for change sake is bad for a waste of resources, time and money. I will say again, just because you can change a thing does not mean you should in IT and you should make **** sure you consult the people whose jobs it is to support your product before you do. As far as I can tell, Microsoft is continuing to make changes without considering the impact on the user or IT professional. They have a business responsibility to consider the impact those changes have on the user.

I am Joe Average and Microsoft puts out a new OS. It costs me $259.00 to buy the upgrade. If all goes well during the upgrade, I don't have to hire a PC Technician to fix the botched install. If not, well add another $75.00 plus dollars to that. Because Microsoft decides I didn't need to have the option of doing things the way I knew how anymore, so, if I don't have the time, patience, desire or skill to figure it out, it will cost me another $150.00 to $350.00 in classes to learn how to use it. And then I will still spend the next several months learning what they were supposed to teach me in class.

Look, I'm no Apple fan either but why do you think they have such a loyal, fanatical user base? It's because while they make improvements, they don't complicate things buy making big changes to how things have to be done.

[Yzöwl]

<snip>

Sorry but you're making a mountain out of a mole hill, the NT OS Start Menu you're shouting about has really been in use since NT3.5 and is due an overhaul. If number of clicks is your problem you should think about creating a set of macros, utilising some scripts etc. There are many third party Menus, Launchers, File Managers and Shells to choose from if you really cannot handle a possible extra click or two. It's not as if you haven't had time to start adapting; XP gave you a New Start Menu, and left the old one there as an option in order to help you slowly ease the transition. Vista further afforded you extra time to change by keeping the legacy option as a fall-back for those who were very slow at adapting. You still chose to ignore it and remained steadfast with the old system; how long should Microsoft keep making allowances for those who don't wish to make changes?

[DeathNACan]

You have already made up you mind that I am just some old guy

Not so. But I already made up my mind that you're a Vista basher, and that what you say are merely personal opinions, without much (if any) facts to back them up.

They made deals with OEM's PC Manufacturers to push it on customers. Try buying a PC with Windows XP or NO OS installed today

You mean exactly like it always was? Like when you could get XP but not Win2k anymore? (and son on for every n-1 version)

OEM's reject vista

OEMs complaining? Yeah, that'd be because they now have to sell you a machine with more than 256MB of RAM and onboard Intel GMA video.

the people who fix and keep your computers running at your job

That would be me.

Upgrade the RAM for one computer for $60.00 and you won't go out of budget. Upgrade the RAM for 3000 computers and you just spent $180000.00.

You can get enough RAM to run Vista for much less than $60 at full retail price, in big name brands no less, at full retail prices and in quantities of 1. And that's assuming you had no RAM at all, or will dispose of the old one. Newegg will sell you 2GB of DDR2 667 for $17 everyday. If you shop around, and are buying 3000 packs, you'd get a better price (let's say $13.33). So let's say $40000 total, which isn't much $ for a company with like 3000 employees. Iit may still looks like a large number, but a company that size pays several millions of $ on salaries weekly. $17 is a ridiculously low investment in fact, and it'll pay itself VERY fast. If it just saves a single hour worth of wait time over the lifetime of the machine (several years), then it already cost less than nothing. If it saves a single second everyday it already paid for itself. It's nowhere near as bad as you try to portray it. BTW, 250x$1200 isn't 1.2M but 1/4 of that (not that it would cost anywhere near that in the first place).

but more because a lot of businesses I see have just finished upgrading to XP in the last 2 - 3 years, and won't really be in the market for new Windows software until XP goes out of mainstream support this year

That's if they don't wait until extended support is over in 2014. And then upgrade to Windows 8. They're not avoiding Vista at all (unlike what DeathNACan claims), they're just in no hurry to upgrade yet as they just got XP recently.

You need to stop thinking like a home user. Most corporations have a very specific list of vendors they do business with. It takes a paperwork just to get on the list.

Before we got swallowed by a bigger fish, my boss used to go to one of the local PC Repair places to buy RAM and they still charged us more than they would someone off the street! After we were gobbled up, we had to go through corporate to get everything. And I do mean everything, from toilet paper to new desktop computers. Most of the time, they end up paying way too much for what they buy. I know, I've seen the receipts. It made me what to cry when I saw what they were paying for things because I knew that somewhere, some bean counter was trying to figure out how to get the cost down and the first thing usually hit was labor, as in jobs.

And I will go so far as to say most don't buy from Newegg or any other Internet based retailer, you don't see that happening a lot, if it all. By the way, I like Newegg!. What you and I can go to the local Best Buy and get for say $59.95 on sale or Newegg for $19.95, a corporation will pay $89.95 for from some local "Authorized Retailer" with an IBM, Dell, Compaq or HP logo on their door or though corporate purchasing. Same stuff, higher price. Go figure!

Corporations give the profits to investors and that's called dividends. They generate bigger profits, so they can pay hirer dividends, in the following ways:

Gaining more market share... making more sales.

Reducing the cost of a product's materials... make it cheaper or buy it cheaper.

Reducing the cost of labor by either redefining how something is produced so it is less expensive or just plain finding somewhere less expensive to make it.

The last is representative of the business philosophy in the Corporate America right now. It is the current fad to outsource to labor to somewhere cheaper. An example of this was when the company I worked for moved its mortgage servicing division from New York City to Columbus Georgia where the labor costs were lower. Later I saw over 300 people loose their jobs when they were sent to India.

To keep profits up, somewhere is a bean counter trying to figure out how to reduce costs... all the time! So don't think that those new PC's at work or that new OS you got last year, or whenever, might not have cost someone their job. When you add the RAM upgrade, hard drive upgrade, training costs, lost productivity to all the other things being paid for, they probably did. Discounting corporate greed, which is a given, all you have to do is look at the unemployment figures in the United States and you will see what I am taking about.

By the way, I used to work for the following companies: GreenPoint Financial Corporation, North Fork Bank, and Capitol One. As of January 1st of this year, everyone I know at Capitol One here in Columbus Georgia just lost their jobs. Most of their jobs were also sent to India over the last few years, the rest went somewhere else so I know what I am talking about. And the moral of the story is... every penny counts and no dollar is too small, particularly when you have to multiply it by numbers from 100 to 10000.

What I have been writing has been meant to be informative. I hope you will not take it personally and some day can make use of it. Someday, they job you it save could be your own!

[DeathNACan]

<snip>

Sorry but you're making a mountain out of a mole hill, the NT OS Start Menu you're shouting about has really been in use since NT3.5 and is due an overhaul. If number of clicks is your problem you should think about creating a set of macros, utilising some scripts etc. There are many third party Menus, Launchers, File Managers and Shells to choose from if you really cannot handle a possible extra click or two. It's not as if you haven't had time to start adapting; XP gave you a New Start Menu, and left the old one there as an option in order to help you slowly ease the transition. Vista further afforded you extra time to change by keeping the legacy option as a fall-back for those who were very slow at adapting. You still chose to ignore it and remained steadfast with the old system; how long should Microsoft keep making allowances for those who don't wish to make changes?

As to third party Menus, Launchers, File Managers and Shells, those in corporate IT are not usually afforded that luxury. The introduction of such into the corporate environment is usually considered risky, not provided for in the budget, and against corporate IT policy. Secondly, the use of scripts in many larger corporation is, for security reasons, policy restricted and therefore not always available to the average support person, let alone the desktop user. There are also software licensing issues you haven't considered.

Again, why force change upon the user at the expense of money and productivity unnecessarily? Why not give them the option? This is not about likes or dislikes, this is about bad business policy and bad IT practices.

[Yzöwl]

I must ask you to keep on topic, we don't need a business lesson and certainly don't need to have `how much more you think you know than us` forced onto us.

This topic only requires these points specifically answering.

What are the specific reasons why since the release of Windows XP you have been unable to move away from the Classic Start Menu, and what is now preventing you from finding an alternative prior to your next major upgrade.

[Chrno]

As to third party Menus, Launchers, File Managers and Shells, those in corporate IT are not usually afforded that luxury. The introduction of such into the corporate environment is usually considered risky, not provided for in the budget, and against corporate IT policy. Secondly, the use of scripts in many larger corporation is, for security reasons, policy restricted and therefore not always available to the average support person, let alone the desktop user. There are also software licensing issues you haven't considered.

Again, why force change upon the user at the expense of money and productivity unnecessarily? Why not give them the option? This is not about likes or dislikes, this is about bad business policy and bad IT practices.

Ever heard of Open source, there's lots of Open source shells and file/app managers out there, try em out for gods sake.

Curious, but why ignore superbar? It's the nest best thing next to the now useless start menu (IMO)

If your that stubborn and "old school" mover to linux, and stop crying because out of the few OSs we. The only one you have been using made a change and you refused to move one like the rest of us did or didn't even care from the beginning at all. Look at DOS for example. Untill 2000ish people were still using it and blasphemous shells and what not, who said that computers are not and never will be "personal" to begin with. There are still people out there hugging their VHS recorders and CRTs. If you don't like the fact that humand can chnage, then stay were you are and don't complain because people can change and always have for the past 200,000 years or so.

[CoffeeFiend]

Sorry but you're making a mountain out of a mole hill

You don't have to adapt, but you can bet your bottom dollar that the 'kids with small experience in windows administration' will and take your job as a result.

I must ask you to keep on topic, we don't need a business lesson and certainly don't need to have `how much more you think you know than us` forced onto us.

QFT x3! These are the best posts I've read in a good while.

Those people who chose not to adapt and for the most part quite lazy & unwilling to learn anything new and change their ways can keep living in the past for a while, but they'll soon enough find themselves replaced by people who aren't afraid of change & fighting it for no good reason. I'm starting to get a feel where Dilbert's "Mordac: The Preventer of Information Services" comes from right now. There's a lot of IT staff that just gets in your way like that, and I think we're seeing a prime example of that here.

There's a lot of pointless whining, all over small changes in a *start menu* ffs. Then again, perhaps they just adapted to the Win95 start menu last year, and before that they were angry because MS took their so-much-better Win 3.11 GUI from them...

[GrofLuigi]

I eat chease. Now someone comes and tells me it's enough, I've done it for twenty years, I must adapt to the new ways... and start eating mushrooms.

Why don't you leave me an option to do what I want? I'm not telling you to use the old start menu.

That's dictatorship.

And one good reason to use DOS: direct hardware control. Try telling the Seagate victims that came to our forum to unbrick their drives under XP, Vista or Seven.

GL

[DeathNACan]

I must ask you to keep on topic, we don't need a business lesson and certainly don't need to have `how much more you think you know than us` forced onto us.

This topic only requires these points specifically answering.

What are the specific reasons why since the release of Windows XP you have been unable to move away from the Classic Start Menu, and what is now preventing you from finding an alternative prior to your next major upgrade.

"Some people prefer to resist change (and bi*ch about it) instead of embracing it. Nothing we can do I'm afraid.

I never cared too much for XP's start menu (took too bloody long to get to any app you haven't used last), but Vista's and its search is a million times better than XP's and classic. You can start ~99% of your apps in 4-6 keystrokes, without ever touching the mouse.

sorry with the old menu have to do more clicks to get the programs open. You're only intolerant in having new ideas. I hope they never bring those old, stupid startmenu back.

It's a good thing why some posters in this thread are retired. You know what they can, "Can't teach an old dog new tricks."

I guess when you get to that retirement age, you like things the way they always were.

Sooooo.... that doesn't mean keep things as they were. Some people **CAN** HANDLE change and ADAPT to new way of doing things. Hey, it might actually be faster.

Gosh, if we didn't improve, we would still be getting out of our car and winding up the engine!

So, come on. Quit posting the same old crap about MS this and MS that. If you don't like it, don't use it. Simple.

That's basically it. Some people prefer to fight change instead of embracing it, and usually whine in the process.

If they listened to these people, we'd still be using the command line (no GUI), because "it's just as good of a program launcher" (that's what they all said in the win 3.x era anyhow) -- who needs a mouse anyways? There's always someone complaining about any minute change in the interface, something that got moved by an inch, any new way that's actually better, things placed more logically and all that -- just because it's different, and they don't want to adapt ("the old one worked! why did they do this?")

Just like if they change the GUI, people say "it's just a new skin" (whereas if they didn't change it, they'd say NOTHING as changed as they don't seem to see past the GUI).

Just like they complain about "bloat" for any new feature that's added (they don't use it, so surely nobody else does, right?), and if they added nothing, then it would be a worthless upgrade, etc.

And so on.

The good part is soon they'll stop whining about Vista. The bad part is, they'll be whining about Win 7, then Win 8, 9 and so on.

The ONLY way to please those people is to have a totally identical GUI (no changes at all, nothing moved) yet still have a new shiny GUI, has new features (yet doesn't have them), various enhancements (yet not have them), and have that run on a vic 20, and be free and open source -- and even then, they might have to pay you to run their OS before they stop complaining.

It's a good thing they don't listen to them. Not every change is for the best, but for the most part (~95%) it is.

Not so. But I already made up my mind that you're a Vista basher, and that what you say are merely personal opinions, without much (if any) facts to back them up.

sorry, if you are intolerant against improvements change your job so that you're no longer confronted with new things. If all people would think like you we would still sits in caves"

***

This thread changed when these comments were posted. I have a question for you. Why didn't say something when all the above was being posted here? I have tried to remain both civil and constructive while others have been insulting and argumentative. Next time you tell someone to stay on topic, please read the whole thread. Or is it this forum's policy that as long as someone agrees with the moderator's opinions, they can say anything, even insulting others, their life's work, their experience, and yes THEIR OPINIONS? You know, I've been wrong before but I learned and got wiser for it. For that matter, I am still learning and I hope wiser. But when did you become too old to learn? Probably about the same time I was supposed to be getting too old to change. Don't bother commenting, I know you will delete this anyway.

Edited January 22, 2009 by DeathNACan

[cluberti]

I must ask you to keep on topic, we don't need a business lesson and certainly don't need to have `how much more you think you know than us` forced onto us.

A mod specifically asked that this thread be kept on target, and it has not. It is obvious these arguments are not to be resolved, and since a mod has once been ignored, I expect to be as well. Closing thread.

[Closed].