There are unused icons on your desktop

There are unused icons on your desktop
One of many endless trivia that makes Windows XP more frusatrating than Windows 2000. Windows XP 64 has one advantage that might be worth the pain to some people but for me, XP is not worth the effort.

Does anyone want to buy my Windows XP 64 CD? I have a pile of unused Windows CDs even after throwing out a dozen of the old ones.

I used to use Windows Server edition for my desktop because the server edition had nice features you need on a desktop. Then Microsoft changed their pricing structure and a conversion from Windows desktop edition to Linux became cheaper than the conversion to the Windows Server edition.

All the NT CDs went out a long time ago because USB hardware manufacturers refused to release USB dirvers for NT. The only reason appears to be that they are victims of Microsoft's desperate need to force users into upgrades and USB support appears to be the only reason to upgrade from NT to Windows 2000, which led to Microsoft artificially suppressing USB support in NT.

I had a pile of Windows Server editions and used them for a while because they had software RAID that really worked. Microsoft software RAID killed that semi hardware/software/driver RAID supplied with add on cards and motherboards plus it killed Linix/Unix software RAID. Linux software RAID configuration gradually improved and Microsoft introduced all sorts of complexities completely useless for a desktop computer or a regular size server. The Windows server edtions are now relaced by Ubuntu Linux and the Windows server disks are in the bin.

That leaves a Windows 2000 disk and a Windows XP 64 disk for one computer with all my other computers ruiing Linux or CentOS. I think there might be a few Windows SBS disks left to throw out, at AU$1500 each, but a simple free Ubuntu desktop DVD produces a better server for small businesses.

Turn it off

Right click the desktop, select Properties, Customise Desktop, Properties, switch off Run desktop cleanup wizard every 60 days, then select OK, OK.

Will Microsoft ever learn?

One of the screamingly bad features of Microsoft software was that paperclip animation that claimed to help but slowed everything down and never, in my experience, produced a correct guess at what might be wrong. Millions of Microsoft users fought to remove the animation but it always came back and every Microsoft update turned the animation back on.

Despite the huge volume of complaints, Microsoft pushed on and added all sorts of annoying popups including the unused desktop icons popup. The paperclip addnimation eventually disappeared but the unused icons popup will not go away.

THe first time I tried to use Vista I spent three hours switching off annoyances and they were only the easy ones. In the end I had to upgrade from Vista to XP to fix all the Vista problems then, eventaully, upgrade from XP to Windows 2000 to fix the remaining XP problems.

Conclusion

This is one of many reasons to stay with old releases of Windows or to convert to Linux. Each release of Windows has more and more annoying things you have to turn off before you can use Windows productivly.