I am incredibly piddled off with Windows Vista. I decided, as I was already using the machine, that I’d use it to upgrade this blog to WordPress 2.7 Beta 3.
Bad move, it turns out. Explorer took ten minutes to extract half of the ZIP archive before it decided to crash. Annoyed, I restarted the process. I clicked through the endless prompts (do you want to merge? do you want to overwrite? ARE YOU SURE? POSITIVE? You never know, it’s open-source, it might be dangerous…)
Anyway, after lumbering through the zip file again, it again crashed. Mightily piddled off, I deleted the folder it had previously been extracted to, and restarted the process again. Again, after five minutes of extracting at a painfully slow rate, Explorer died. Again.
I started again, this time using the 7-Zip shell extension. Everything was done in ten seconds. Compare that to the five minutes using Windows’s own extraction libraries and you see why I consider Vista to be sub-standard.
Anyway, now to upload using FTP. It took Windows AN HOUR AND A HALF to upload a 5.4mB folder. Using Nautilus or Dolphin, that normally only takes fifteen minutes, even with my crawling Virgin Media connection.
Is this really the best MS can do, after FIVE YEARS of gestation? It’s a perfectly simple task: extract archive, FTP to server. I am appalled that people actually pay money for this. I would rather they hadn’t included the function to extract ZIP files at all, instead of the stupid situation where we have a system that simply cannot work through a basic ZIP file.