Shutdown Issues

[Bill Conner]

I've been a UNIX and Linux Sysadmin for many years so anything from Microsoft seems sloppy by comparison. My latest complaint is the stupid "unexpected shutdown" message I get after every reboot. Seems like I once found a way to disable boot monitoring but I've since forgotten how. The issue apparently is Vista has no way to gracefully terminate running processes so it just pulls the plug on jobs with no sane cleanup. Does anyone know of a way to just turn off the shutdown error tracking and reporting?

Another beef is the way Windows Explorer insists on displaying folders from the perspective of the Desktop - by default. This is just retarded. I need a folder view and, since I use multiple partitions, a view of those disks makes more sense. I had to modify the Windows Explorer shortcut to:

"%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /e,root,c:\"

to get a sensible default view.

Being more at home with the command line, I also jettisoned all the graphical garbage and that ridiculous sidebar (a straight ripoff of the MAC) and populated the desktop with shortcuts that actually do useful stuff.

The whole Microsoft attitude seems to be that the users are idiots who need hand holding to accomplish even the simplest tasks. Unfortunately their solutions make tweaking the OS difficult and tedious. Alas, I'm stuck with Vista on my laptop but I dual boot Linux and run Linux in the VMware Server so I'm not completely trapped. I've even got Linux on A USB key, just in case.

All of this could be avoided if the dingalings at Microsoft were even half as clever as they think they are.