Re: Frustration level with Windows -- ARG!

"-hh" <recscuba_google@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1139528198.457727.62790@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dan Johnson wrote:
"-hh" <recscuba_google@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dan Johnson wrote:

[snip- who I sleep with, apparently]

Windows does not generally try to advertise this stuff until it needs to:
until you try to interact with the app.

Worse than that. I can have an app sieze and you can go take a ten
minute coffee break and come back, and there still won't be a "oops,
its dead" dialog box volunteered.

You don't understand. The dialog box does not just jump out in front of you
for no reason. It take a few seconds for Windows to notice the app is
not responding and take over its window.

Thereafter, you click the *close box* to get the dialog.

It wouldn't be nice to pop up
that dialog while you were working in some other app, right?

You're absolutely correct: the WinXP behavior where MS-Outlook pops up
those "Attention!! I thought you should know that the bloody
MS-Exchange Server is being non-responsive again...but I'll pretend I'm
making progress" window is a nuisance.

That is MS-Outlook, not Windows. And yes, it's obnoxious. Windows
XP has some UI features that are supposed to help with this- applications
can use those little balloons that come out of the taskbar.

But most do not; they aren't compatible with Windows 2000 for
one thing.

Sure. Windows is a little less aggressive about this; it won't
treat the app as "non-responding" as readily as Mac OS X will.

Yes, you're correct in saying that Windows has lower performance
standards:

... higher *compatibility* standards, actually. :D

Mac OS X's timeout criteria for having the beachball appear
is if the App has failed to respond in 2 seconds. One thousand one,
one thousand two.

It's a little more on Windows. I don't have the number, though.

But it does not take *that* long; a few seconds, in my experience.

From your previous post, I think it make take longer for you because
your computer is apparently very very slow (for whatever reason).

Its an IBM T41p laptop, with a 1.7GHz Pentium (M) and 1GB RAM, which is
not a horrible slouch...afterall, its not like I'm trying to run
Pro/Engineer on it. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that I can go
take a coffee break before XP Pro realizes that something's amiss.

Then something else is wrong- aside from the difficulty you are having
understanding how XP handles these things. You described a very slow
system before, much slower than any 1GB Windows system ought to
be.

[snip]
If I understand you, then *all* of those windows are nonresponding (maybe
they are all fom the same nonresponding app).

Not quite. Except for the dead App, the other windows would be
responsive, but because they're being displayed wrong, you don't dare
touch them. In general, I use the "Show Desktop" shortcut to minimize
them all, and then I can pick through them individually, save work,
etc, and sort out what App screwed things up and then using the Task
Manager, go in and kill just that App...which takes down however many
windows of the total that it was responsible for.

If they were working properly they would not be "displayed wrong";
not unless you have bad video drivers or something worse.

Windows that respond will redraw after being exposed.

The behavior here is that they don't redraw properly after being
exposed by clicking on the window edge, or by trying to pull them up
from below. The only reliable way to get the window to redraw properly
is to clear the entire desktop via "Show Desktop" and then pull up a
window.

I have never seen this particular behavior before. I can't say what's
wrong, but you ought to know this isn't typical of Windows installations.

FWIW, the Dell desktop that I used before this IBM laptop was the same
way. As such, I'm inclined to not say the behavior is hardware-based,
but is OS/App based.

If you managed to get two computers from different manufacturers to
do this, I expect the problem is something you have done to the
computers. Or it might be your IT department; or even some strange
application that damages Windows (!) and that you always use.

But I cannot guess. I have not seen this behavior before and I
don't understand what would cause it.

If you asked me to deliberately produce this sort of a mess, I
would spawn a large number of processing, and have them waste
a lot of CPU and also consume as many kernel handles as they
could. There are per-process limits, but with enough processes
I might exhaust the paged pool, so other processes could not
allocate GDI handles and therefore could not draw.

But this doesn't quite fit- if I did this, "Show Desktop" would
not help a bit.

[snip]
This isn't the only way to get to the "not responding, may I kill it?"
dialog; it's rather roundabout compared to some others.

Once Windows 'takes over' the offending window, you can hit its
close box to get this dialog, for instance.

I'll try that next time, but I believe I've already tried this. In any
event, based on past XP performance, I shouldn't have to wait more than
2-3 weeks for the "opportunity".

If your computer is as broken as you have indicated, you are probably
right- it sounds like it is performing very badly indeed.

[snip]
You asked it to close the application, not terminate the process. Since
you are using task manager, you can do the latter if you desire it- just
go
to the processes tab, not the applications tab. There is still a
confirmation dialog, however.

Thanks for the distinction.

In any event, the UI of the Process Tab gets significantly more
involved, so its a "last resort" choice as far as I'm concerned

It is meant to be that- but I don't see how it is "more involved";
it is only a longer list containing processes rather than applications.

- - not
unlike classic command line Unix, where you're hoping that you guessed
correctly as to which process number is your shell and which is the
problem child...

There is actually a feature to help with this problem. Go to the
"Applications"
tab, right click the offending app and chose "Go To Process"; the
"Processes" tab will come up with the relevant process selected.

But perhaps this step is what makes it "more involved".

[snip]
...you can get the task list directly with Ctrl-Shift-Esc; it will be
open
to whatever tab you used last.

Why yes it does. I didn't know this "shortcut of a shortcut"; thanks.

This is indeed a handy shortcut.

Ctrl-Alt-Del is actually a security feature, not a shortcut-
it is the secure attention key. But they made it do some other
stuff as well.

3) Find/Select - non-responding App off the process list & click

The application list lists applocations, and the process list lists
processes; it is clear from the later text that you are using the former.

Yes, if for no other reason than its the much friendlier UI for the
more casual user.

It is supposed to be. It is also a *safer* tool, as I have explained.
It's comparable to the Force Quit/Activity Monitor distinction in
Mac OS X.

The odd thing is that "Force Quit" *sounds* violent and dangerous,
but it's actually the gentle version. It shows only apps, not system
processes,
and it tries to stop them "gently" if it can, before resorting to kill -9.

[snip]
5) "Not Responding" dialog appears...Select kill again & click again to
finally kill.

This is going the long way round to get here.

Nevertheless, it is what most...my guess would be over 95%...of the
general Windows User Population knows as the "only" way to do it.

I doubt this. I don't think 95% of the general Windows User Population
knows about the task manager at all.

I think most of them just keep clicking the close box until Windows
"notices". You found the task manager because it resembles what you
are used to in Mac OS X, not because it is the obvious way to close
a misbehaving window.

If the window freezes up, wait a moment and Windows will
take over. You can then click the close button and you get this
dialog.

Clever, eh?

If and only if Windows ever takes over. Its been my experience that
for whatever reason, this happens less than 10% of the time. If I get
a chance next week, I'll ask our two in-house IT Service Tech's what
their opinons are on this.

It is like the app list- it only works if Windows can figure out the app
is knackered. If it pumps its message pump but does not react to it,
Windows will think it *is* responding and not offer to kill it.

Typically this will happen for apps that *do* redraw their windows
but do not respond to clicks. The bug is "too deep" in the app and
Windows can't "see" it.

Only the Task Manager "Processes" tab can stop the app in this case.

This depends on the app. If you use one particular app most of the
time, and it is broken in this specific way, then this might happen
to you a lot. It does not happen to me, because the apps I use are not
broken in this particular way.

[snip]
This isn't as nice as the close box of the offending apps window,
I think.

Between "easy to kill a process" and "crashes so infrequently, you
don't need to know how to kill a process", I think we'll all prefer the
latter.

I have not found Mac OS X to be so stable myself.

Every single Windows User that has any meaningful degree of familiarity
with how to kill frozen app's (myself included) is simply evidence that
the OS's App's lock up a lot more frequently than they really should.
Thinking about a more efficient band-aid is merely "treating symptoms"
whereas we should be trying to "cure the disease".

I do not think *you* are all that "familiar" with it- you didn't know how it
worked, and I have had to explain a number of details about it. If you
used it *that* much, surely you would know all this already!

Nor do I think typical Windows users know more of this than you do;
many know less, I imagine.


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