So Microsoft has released a version of its Windows Vista operating system that is getting close to what the final version will be. Vista RC1 (Release Candidate 1) became available this week. Well, you know me, of course I downloaded it and installed it on a couple of the computers at home. So, what do I think?
Well, it’s pretty, I have to say that, but it behaves in different ways to Windows XP, and sometimes that bites me. Take, for example, the act of upgrading the device drivers and application software for my webcam. The first part of the installation proceeded swimmingly, then I was told the system needed to restart in order to complete the installation. Fine, but when it restarted, I saw this:
OK, I thought, I’ll click, and sure enough, I saw the setup program had been blocked. But even though there was an "enable" button (which I assume would "unblock" the program and let it run to completion), it was greyed out, and I couldn’t unblock the program. I tried several things to unblock the program, but nothing worked, and the device drivers remained uninstalled…
After tearing out my hair on this, I googled and found the solution on a blog written by Vista developers. It turns out that I’d been bitten by poor user interface design.
The balloon does not make it clear that the user needs to right-click on the icon to see a menu where it is possible to unblock the startup programs. Just clicking on the icon (as the balloon suggests) leads to the dialogue box where it is not possible to unblock the programs.
Sigh. If I have to google in order to learn how to use software, then I would contend that it ain’t intuitive…
Geoff Coupe's Blog 
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