What Micorsoft doesn’t get
The laptop I have is dual boot. XP pro and Gentoo. Last night I decided to reinstall windows. Popped in the cd and installed over the windows partition. Windows of course doesn’t need to concern itself with the possibility that you have a real bootloader installed to the MBR, so without asking it blows that away and promptly plops it’s code in there. That’s cool, whatever. So I get my getoo disk out, boot up and resinstall grub (this didn’t go quite that smoothly, but the details are boring so I’ll spare you). At any rate I eventually got that to work and booted into windows to start the update process.
Then I noticed something funny. The first time I ran windows update it added itself to the short list of programs in the start menu’s intial panel. Cool, makes sense. However, I of course had to run the updater over and over again (I should really consider putting together a disk with SP2 on it). Each time I ran it windows assumes it’s more popualr and so it gets “ranked”. But what they do then is, move it UP the short list. In effect each time you run it, it gets further and further away from the Start button. WTF, that makes no sense at all. I am no usablitily guru, but a child must have been in on that decsion.
That’s one reason I make WinXP’s desktop and Start Menu look and act like Win2k.
Ahh, I didn’t realize that didn’t do that. I must try that out.
As an aside, the menuing in Vista is a lot nicer, instead of the fold out that takes over the screen if you have a lot of things installed, it can all be navigated from within the first panel. Which I thinks makes more sense.
Thanks for the commet Don.
If you right-click on the item in that list you have the option of removing it from the list so that it is no longer in the way and bothering you. It isn’t the prettiest solution, but it works.
It’s no so much that it is in the way, as is moves UP the list, instead of down…hence closer to where the mouse is. But removing it might be a good idea too :)