You have some good points, Steve, thanks. I appreciate your response, and
have added some clarifications/perspectives below.
Yes, the bigger problem is the apps that crash. There's a lot of
ill-behaved software out there and most of it isn't written by Microsoft.
My complaint is that these popups and error reports have no ameliorative
effect, so are worse than no popups at all. If you're going to disrupt the
user and offer resolution, you better be able to resolve a problem every once
in a while. If you don't, then you're just pissing the user off. That's the
point I've gotten to with this feature of Vista.
By the way, not once has one of these app crashes been detrimental to the
operation of my PC. I dismiss the popup, and everything seems to keep
working, no problem. That's another reason to be annoyed, not thankful,
about the popups.
Steve Thackery said:
Really? How do you know? I like to keep tabs on developments at Redmond,
and I'm not aware of it being recognised as an issue. UAC prompts, yes.
But appcrash prompts?
My Googling sure found a lot of references to the problem, so I assumed
Microsoft has gotten the message. Perhaps I'm mistaken.
A feature that points out a problem but doesn't help the user resolve it
becomes annoying and accrues negative value. That's the problem with UAC
(which I turned off after getting scores of popups, not one of which warned
me from an action that was anything other than one I initiated and wanted to
happen). Same with the application crash messages. There's an old fable
about the boy who cried wolf that applies here.
I know Microsoft meant well with UAC and the app crash reporting, but the
implementations are fundamentally flawed: (1) Huge numbers of false
positives. Too many of those, and people ignore them (or beg newsgroups to
tell them how to turn them off). (2) No useful remedies when there is a real
problem. If you aren't going to fix the problem, but are only going to give
me useless suggestions like "reboot" or "check the vendor's website for
updates" that don't do anything to improve the situation, maybe you shouldn't
have offered to "look for a solution" and gotten my hopes up.
I'm not convinced it's a flaw. The flaw is with the dodgy software you're
running that keeps crashing. Or maybe you've got a dodgy memory stick chip
or something.
No memory stick. No peripherals at all, actually. Brand new stock Lenovo
laptop.
Dodgy software? No doubt. As I mentioned, Microsoft Word 2007 is one of
the culprits on my PC.
A worse offender is HP's remote printer management software. Now THAT is a
company that has perfected the art of writing ill behaved software. It dies
and causes that well meaning but utterly usless popup every time I move out
of range of whatever printer it thought it was talking to.
What I want is an easy way for me to tell the popup "hey, I already got this
message a couple times before, I know it's caused by dodgy software that you
can't fix, so would you please stop showing this popup to me?".
Every version of Windows from the very beginning has had these warnings when
an application crashes (don't you remember the famous "Unrecoverable
Application Error" from Windows 3.1. days?).
Fair enough. But why did I almost never got such messages on my XP machine,
but don't often get through a day without one on Vista?
Macs tell you when an app has crashed, as does Linux. For Vista to not do
that would be a very unusual design decision.
I would by no means argue that MacOS and Linux are immune. Contrary to
popular opinion, Apple also has a talent for usability mistakes and useless
error messages in their software; they just do it less often than Microsoft.
Linux treats lack of usability as a point of pride. :-> I've used (and
programmed on) Unix/Linux, Windows, and Apple machines for more than 25
years, and understand none are perfect. I would rate Vista's as the least
perfect of all in this respect.
