Some disagreements:

8. The Windows Task Manager is a pretty good utility... but sometimes End Task just doesn't like to work. You can try to kill some processes as much as you want, but the Task Manager will just stare back at you blankly like you never even gave it a command. (That's what people are griping about when they mention it.) Of course, when it DOES work it's a charm. I usually have to force-kill Explorer myself a lot because of stupid things like Explorer "using" a folder or file when it's clearly NOT in use, preventing rename and move operations.

6. As an everyday consumer user of a PC, Windows Update is for the paranoid only. I've been running Windows XP SP2 without any additional patches, hotfixes, or other downloads from Windows Update (and of course, I've disabled it). Why? After finding out with my IT guy at work that Windows Update would have the strange behavior of turning itself back on and downloading things without your consent OR your knowledge. Makes you wonder what Microsoft is up to... Most hotfixes and patches are for closing up holes for security and possible exploits anyway... and unless you pissed off a bunch of geeks, I think the average person is safe without it.

5. The Messenger service is NOT MSN Messenger. It's basically a way for network gurus to send out messages to client machines on a network. The funny thing about this though is that there was enough of an exploit in the protocol that even Microsoft's SP2 patch disables it by default.

4. Notifications are handy at times, but sometimes it can just be redundant to the point of being retarded... not to mention repetitive. I wish that you could selectively deactivate certain notifications...

2. I'm not sure about the programming perspective, but an operating system shouldn't be brought to its knees if you change ONE thing in it. I think that just for dummy's sake, if you're around poking and possible screw something up (manually or with a bad patch or install or whatever) that instead of getting an NTLDR error (or whatever) and having an unbootable system that Windows should detect a corrupted registry and offer to restore a BACKUP or even have something like SFC for the registry.

I have two very strong disagreements: mspaint and Windows Movie Maker! Both are extremely useful programs, although mspaint is by far the superior of the two.

Mspaint actually has a somewhat large, religious following. It is used extensively for pixel art, and it's a very lightweight program for doing simple editing. How convenient would it be if I had to start up the GIMP on my laptop every time I wanted to do a small resize or simple change? Not at all! I can tell you of the terrible experiences I've had with OSX and its lack of a small, lightweight image editor (although there are a few very good third-party ones!).

Now Windows Movie Maker isn't the best product to come out of Micro$oft's depths, but it's definitely not one of the worst. I've used it to create some pretty decent videos for a video editing class. While you have to keep in mind that this is a high school class, the videos were still quite good. It does have an array of features that make it at least good enough to do simple video edits for wedding videos, home videos, or small projects.

They actually messed up the number one most worthless Windows feature: Windows ME! The entire operating system was so bad that I honestly believe it should be above such terrible products as Internet Explorer 6, Windows Genuine Advantage, and ActiveX Controls.

Here's my comments on some of them:

20. DriveSpace

It's only useless since drives nowadays are so darn big. It's still existent in Vista, I think, only it's just called "compress folder".

19. Windows Movie Maker

It has all the features of iMovie, but its interface is blah.

I've never heard of Web TV for Windows, so I'm not even going to comment.

17. Shutdown

This feature was useful back in 1997 when computers had to shut down before they could be turned off. Nowadays the only reason I still "shutdown" my computer is because I don't like the blinking light that's on when I sleep. The light on a Gateway GM5474 shines like a lighthouse when it's dark and it annoys me when I sleep.

16. Paint

This program is useless for editing, but it is good for saving screenshots. Pity it would be useless in Linux if it existed because of the built-in snapshot taker.

15. Windows Aero



Not to mention that it doesn't even look good. I mean, who really likes Segoe UI here?

14. Active Desktop

I don't even remember what this is. This was something from 98 that I don't believe is existent in XP or Vista.

13. Windows XP Search

I completely agree with this one. 98, 2000, and Vista all keep search indexes like Google Desktop search does. I think Vista's search is actually faster. When my old 80-GB hard drive started getting full, I searched for all files that were 6 MB and larger. The engine returned about 30,000 results and took an hour to do so.

12. MSN

Instead of msn.com it's now live.com. Not to mention that the old Hotmail wasn't very good either. It was the first publicly released version of free HTML mail (back in the good old days when the inbox space was just 2 MB), but then it was bought by Microsoft and it started deteriorating and getting branded "Windows Live Mail". It doesn't even keep the extension "hotmail" anymore!

11. Windows Explorer

Actually this is pretty useful. Only, I wish Firefox had those kinds of capabilities... then I could start using it like Konqueror on my Linux installment.

10. Windows 95 USB

Not to mention that it doesn't even work on Windows 95.

9. Windows Genuine Advantage

Yes, this is crap. There are lot of bypassers now that can get rid of the problem, but I never had a non-genuine copy anyways. I think WGA is borderline spyware...

8. End Task

End Task is for sissies. I do it the geek's way and use End Process. It's faster and doesn't clog up the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) as much.

7. User Access Control

I don't even know what this is. Oh, never mind, I do. It's those warnings that Vista gives you to Cancel/Allow stuff, right? Yeah, that's kind of useless, especially if there is only one user.
Even Linux has this, as "sudo". To bypass it, login as root, although that is VERY NOT RECOMMENDED. I mean, on Windows, it's okay, but not on Unix, where programs have direct access to hardware.

6. Automatic Updates (That's the proper title.)

I hate this too. If you set the Automatic update to Level 3 (Automatically download and install updates), it turns off automatically in 5 minutes if you don't "restart later". It doesn't automatically turn off if you set it to levels 1 or 2 (I set it to level 2 personally) but the message can only postpone for a limited amount of time. Thank God in Vista the limit is raised to 4 hours.

5. Messenger Service

I don't know what you're talking about. If you mean the online service that was just branded "MSN", I never used that service, but it's kind of like AOL without the internet access.

4. Notifications

These aren't that bad, it's just that they get annoying, like you said, with add new hardware.

3. IE 6

2 words: Use Firefox. I have 3.0 beta 2 installed right now, and it's pretty stable, actually.

2. Registry

This one is pretty useful. The only problem I have with it is that some things are so damn hard to find in there.

1. ActiveX Controls

To the guy who says Javascript and Flash are all ActiveX, I think the person here is talking about the controls written in VB. At least the JS and Flash controls aren't exploitable.

Well, I have Internet Explorer, and I dont have any problems with it, But maybe thats just me, and because we only have Internet Explorer, its all that I know, and Im used to, so its not too bad for me

♥Evo

The above mentioned features cant be called useless......of course they may be less used because we may have better softwares available......IE has some bugs...but still its fine to work with for most of us......as far as windows messenger service is concerned...i havent seen many guys using it but you have to have a default messenger... well if you talk about notification...they can be annoying but they are really useful sometimes.....messages like "network cable unplugged", "limited or no connectivity","100 mbps connected" are worth shown....they have just tried to provide all the programs...if you find better...use them..whats the point calling the default ones useless....

Here are my two cents on some of the features you mentioned.

19. Windows Movie Maker
I actually believe this is a decent tool. Indeed, there is a large number better options out there but the fact that this comes preinstalled and ready to go out of the box makes it convenient. However, it is EXTREMELY unstable and having to save your work every 30 seconds for fear of it crashing really does kill this tool.

17. Shut Down
I usually don't shutdown either. Also, I can see where you're coming from on your complaint here.

16. Paint
I think its convenient for when I have a picture with a 2 pixel white border I need to remove, but I don't want to take the time to fire up Photoshop.

14. Active Desktop
I never knew what it was either.

9. Windows Genuine Advantage
Incredibly annoying indeed. My dad gave his computer to a shop once to get it fixed and they ended up reformatting and giving him a pirate copy (unintentionally on his part). The little popup makes you want to smasht he computer. Fortunately, we did find a way to remove it and it never bothered us again.

8. End Task
The key here is to go under the processes tab (instead of applications) in the Task Manager window. Then you select the process's exe file (e.g.: MSWord.exe) and click end process then confirm by pressing yes. It instantly kills the task. The only thing that doesn't work for is Explorer, but if you're using that you probably have more problems than being annoyed by End Task.

6. Windows Update
The restart popup sucks. Many times I was in the middle of a crucial part of a game and it got minimized just for the stupid popup to show up. My solution: Get a good firewall and anti-virus (let them update), disable windows update, and whenever you hear about a REAL "critical" update that is needed, temporarily turn it back on.

4. Notifications
Any type of popup is generally annoying, but these are especially bad.

3. Internet Explorer 6
I honestly think this deserves #1. It's really sad that most people are still running this and even sadder that most companies are too lazy to adapt their sites to other browsers coming out. Many only allow you to access them through IE which is just plain dumb.

2. The Registry
It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't impossible to manuever through it. Many times, you know what it is you need to fix or delete, but finding it is like traversing through hell.

1. ActiveX Controls
To my knowledge, I've never used them, but anytime I was forced to use IE and was asked to allow one, it was usually an attempt by some malicious entity.

It was made this way on purpose so you would get ripped off by "tech specialists" and stuff like that. The cryptic style of this system would scare most people away.

Three things.

Firstly, I think that the IE is sucky in a whole.
The Taskmanager doesn't really work...
Windows Aero seems like a completely useless feature. Why in heavens name would you want to turn your windows in 3D?! I have asked numerous people, and so far no one could give me an answer that made any sense. I think that is a quite useless addtition, and I am so glad it's not "built in" like hundreds of other utilities and effects.

Actually, DriveSpace was quite useless to me when I had Windows 98(I think). It worked and everything, but as soon as I installed something large, it would suddenly eat the compression away, leaving you with the original size at the end.