For the past two weeks or so, I've been stuck rather unfortunately with a Windows laptop. The DC In board in my iBook suffered some trouble, and as such, is being repaired. Despite using this computer for almost two weeks now, there are still some things that I just cannot get used to about Windows.
The main thing is the interactive focus of the system. On Mac OS X, the icons along the bottom refer to applications as a whole, just as Command-Tab and other icon references do. This means I can click a Dock icon, and it focuses the application, allowing me to easily manipulate it.
But this doesn't happen on Windows. The taskbar icons refer to application windows, which means that I can't focus on the application and easily flick between application windows without having to worry about other programs getting in the way.
The other major problem is window closing behaviour. On nearly all Mac OS X programs, closing the last window doesn't kill the program. Instead, it just sits there waiting until you close it, or until you next use it. Sensible, especially if you want to bring up a browser window at lightning speed. The problem with most programs on Windows, though, is that when you close the last window (let's say, for arguments sake, Internet Explorer), the program becomes unloaded from memory and thus, loses focus. I can't then just press Ctrl-N to spawn a new window. Instead, I have to wait for the system to load the program back into memory before I can use it again.
Seems insane. I would rather have control over what my system is doing exactly, but Windows takes a lot of that control away. Opening two Word documents opens two instances of Microsoft Word, which results in twice the memory usage. Closing those documents means that Word has to be loaded back into memory again!
The behaviour of Windows is odd, and quite frankly, all wrong.
