As explained in Chapter 6, the Green Ribbon of Death??”
capable of bringing Windows Explorer to its knees??”comes from a combination
of poor design and bugs in its code. And thus the reason for distinguishing
where an annoyance becomes clear: you need to know what you??™re
dealing with in order to fix it.
xvi | Preface
The User Account Control (UAC) feature in Windows Vista is a perfect
example of a feature gone awry. Most of the time, UAC does precisely what it
was designed to do??”prevent programs from doing harm to your PC, occasionally
asking your permission when it deems it appropriate to do so??”but
the result is a system that frequently bothers you with UAC prompts, while
intermittently breaking your applications without telling you why. Because
this behavior isn??™t caused by a bug per se, fixing the problem is instead just a
matter of customizing the system so that it suits your needs.
This inevitably leads to an important conclusion: one person??™s annoyance is
another??™s feature. Although Microsoft may be motivated more by profit than
excellence, often leading to products designed for the lowest common
denominator, you??™re not bound to that fate. In other words, you should not
be required to adjust the way you think in order to complete a task on your
computer; rather, you should learn how to adjust the computer to work in a
way that makes sense to you.
But I prattle on. Feel free to dive in to any part of the book and start eliminating
annoyances.
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