Vista and the Up Button
(Originally Posted 2/2009)
By: James Oppenheim | Created: 2012-05-22 12:50:35 | (Updated: 0000-00-00 00:00:00)
I've been very busy, in the best sense of the word, building a new computer based on the EVGA X58 motherboard. It's the first system I've built in some time, and I thought I'd give Vista SP1 a try. The experiment has lasted less than a month. I'm sorry Microsoft, the lack of an up button in Windows Explorer is a deal breaker and it will probably keep me from upgrading to Windows 7 as well.
It's been more than a decade that Windows has been training my brain and fingers. Every day, over and over again, it has taught me to do certain things a certain way. These are things you do so often that they don't consume any brain cycles anymore. You just click and they work: From the intuitive control+c for copy to the non-intuitive control+v to paste, I've learned to do it the Windows way.
So Microsoft, why do you insist on breaking what is not broken? When you upgraded me from Windows '98 to XP I forgave you that you changed the icon on the top left of my desktop from My Computer to My Documents, but getting rid of the up button goes too fark.
I'm moving up and down my computer's directory structure all day. It's sometimes the only exercise I get, moving files, copying pictures. I don't always want to go back to where I started, I want to go "up", precisely one directory. Why, after more than a decade of teaching me exactly how to do that do you take the method away.
Oh, sure, there are workarounds. I can take my hand off the mouse and do an Alt+UpKey. But, I don't want to take my hand off the mouse. I could buy an up button from a third party developer, but it doesn't work with all themes, and besides why should I have to pay for functionality that was included with the previous version. If I wanted to do that I could have paid Dell extra to send me a Vista computer downgraded to XP.
I've tried to retrain my brain, but I find this operating system always getting in my way. The "are you sures?" of the user account system are well documented, but Vista trips me up in other subtle ways all the time. For instance, when I was trying to save a file I had open in Dreamweaver, it wouldn't let me save. It wanted me to get the Administrator. I am the Administrator, and all I wanted to do was exactly what I always had done in every OS and every version of Dreamweaver since they each came out.
Yes, I was able to work around it, but why shouldn't the operating system work around me?
