Monday, July 11, 2011

Windows 7 takes a step backward toward DOS

Back in the bad old days when a program locked up, you could reboot (control-alt-delete) or cycle power to regain control. Windows NT, ancestor of today's windows fixed that. Control-alt-delete brought up Task Manager which allowed you to select the errant program with the mouse and shut it down.
Windows 7 seems to have broken this handy feature. Task Manager still come up, but the mouse doesn't work, which makes it nearly impossible to do anything useful with Task Manager.
"Nearly" means there are some keyboard short cuts that allow the user to do mouse things with keystrokes but few people remember what those short cuts are. I surely don't.

4 comments:

Evan said...

That's strange. It might just be your computer, the mouse has always worked fine for me in task manager on windows 7.

Windows 7 is a massive leap from XP (lets not even touch Vista - MS) in terms of usability and security. I like how it forces the user to answer yes/no before letting an executable run.

Dstarr said...

It's Jonanthan's new computer. Which I don't get to play with much. Does W7 prevent malicious macros in Word and Excel documents attached to emails from running if clicked on?

Evan said...

If you have the latest (Word 2010/Excel 2010/etc.) it won't let you run scripts from files that you're accessing from the internet or a network unless you explicitly click on a warning bar.

Microsoft is paying a lot more attention to security and doing a pretty good job of it.

Dstarr said...

I'm still running on Office 2003 of which I have a legal copy. And does the latest Office block macros inside .doc and .xls files as well as scripts? They ought to provide a way for user's to disable the visual basic built into office products 'cause most users never write macros and the VB capability just runs malicious code.