Taskbars that Mess with Your Brain!
Last year I purchased a new Net Book that runs Windows XP. First of all, I must say that this Acer Aspire one is an amazing little computer. I just can’t say enough good things about it. It’s really too bad Apple missed this market (the market being a nice little computer under $300 to use for surfing the internet).
At any rate, I’m not sure I’d want Mac OS X running on this little Atom processor. Windows XP works fine on this machine. It’s just Windows itself that drives me up the wall!
Take for instance this rather curiously annoying habit of the Taskbar:
With this small display I do the best to maximize how much of it I can use. The Windows XP Taskbar can be set to ‘hide’ and only pop into view when needed. Unfortunately, the Taskbar won’t hide when you often need it to. It just sits there blocking you from using the buttons or scroll bars that are underneath of it. You can wait forever for it to hide, but it just won’t!
Taskbar or task-barrier?
To make matters worse when you go to change the settings in your preference control panel, the taskbar will hide! Then it’ll pop back into view again and then it’ll hide again. Often just waiting for it to go away won’t work. You need to use Jedi mind tricks to make it work. If anyone knows of a way to fix this (such as downloading a third party software patch or the like), please let me know. I’d pay at least $15 to fix this weird obstacle keeping me from performing my tasks.
Update: This has been fixed! How? It must have been fixed by a recent update from Microsoft. Yeh! The power of electronic thought osmosis, someone else out there must have also been annoyed with the way it worked. I must say if you add a mouse to this little netbook, the Windows XP interface isn’t that combersome. Sure it’s not OS X, but it’s ok, of course flipping over to Linux is easy enough too.
Does this problem happen all the time or just with certain apps like picture slideshow?
You’re right it happens with applications like ‘Picture Viewer’ using the ’slideshow’ or just trying to get to the next picture. That Taskbar will sometimes work great and then all of a sudden it just gets in the way. It’s a minor inconvenience that ultimately, I can probably live with, I’m sure there are bigger issues with XP to fry.