Top 10: Most futile Windows features
In anticipation of Windows 8, we take a look at the features and mistakes that Microsoft needn't bother reprising
4. Windows force quit
In this case we’re more annoyed by the absence of an application than by an application itself. If a program stops responding, Mac users have the Force Quit option and Linux users get XKill, which closes any unresponsive window you choose to click on. Windows users, however, are still stuck with either right-clicking on the application’s taskbar icon and selecting close – which often doesn’t work if the application is genuinely unresponsive – or by pressing Ctrl + Alt +Del, selecting Task Manager and then using that to terminate the application once you’re allowed back to your desktop. Hardly convenient.
3. DriveSpace
In the dark days of MS-DOS and even Windows 9x, disk space was often at a premium as users’ hunger for application and data storage outstripped the capacity of the tiny and expensive hard disks of the time.
DriveSpace, originally named DoubleSpace, was a disk compression utility designed to stuff extra data into your available disk space, although the exact level of compression possible varied. It worked much as any other compression utility, but instead of zipping up a few files, it acted on your entire hard disk. A special driver, launched at boot time, allowed the compressed data to be extracted on the fly.
Unfortunately, DriveSpace was incompatible with some software, including many games that required their own specialist boot disk and configuration. It also consumed a great deal of memory, which meant that you couldn’t run memory-intensive applications.
These issues, along with widely-publicised reports of data loss and a general lack of faith in the underlying compression technology meant that DriveSpace was soon abandoned. Given that we now consider a 500GB hard disk to be slightly on the small side, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever need full-disk compression again.
