So I’ve been using Windows 7 for a few weeks now actively at work. The upgrade from Vista went okay, except that the machine locks up every hour or so for a minute, spinning its disk drive. I don’t know what it’s doing, or if this weird behavior is a vestige of the Vista upgrade. Who knows….. maybe a clean install of Windows 7 will fix it. I hope.
But my biggest beef with Windows 7 is the task bar. It’s nicer than XP, yes. The way it groups and displays applications is wonderful. But its behavior is inconsistent.
- When I click on an application that has only one window open, it brings that window to the front. NICE!
- When I click on an application that has several windows open, it pops up its menu of possibilities. NOT nice.
Why can’t it bring all the windows to the front? There’s not even an option to do that in there if you right-click. It’s inconsistent. Clicking does different things depending on how many windows are open for the application.
This is especially annoying with The Gimp, which has lots of windows: Pallete, Layer, Paths, Images, Colors, and more. Getting them to the front is quite simply a pain in the neck, and to edit an image, you really need to bring all those windows to the front.
It also shows up in Firefox and IE, when I want to open the firebug or IE developer console along with the web page when I’m viewing web pages in different browsers.
Almost everything else about Windows 7 I dearly love, but this one thing drives me bonkers. I do hope that Microsoft fixes it soon. There are tons of other glitches in the user experience that are neglected, but this one’s the most practically annoying for me personally.