Top 10: Most futile Windows features

2. User Account Control

Home users first got UAC in Windows Vista. Designed to prevent programs from being installed and settings changed without permission from an administrator account, it helped both to prevent malware from taking hold on a PC without the user’s knowledge and to keep unprivileged users (kids, flatmates, particularly precocious cats) from doing anything devastating to your system.

Unfortunately, most users – ourselves included – found its default settings to be overly paranoid, asking approval for even the most minor of actions, and often producing several pop-ups during the installation of a single software package. Because of its irritation value, some users simply disabled it, entirely negating its usefulness as a security measure. Fortunately, Windows 7’s implementation of UAC is significantly less chatty, only prompting you to approve higher-risk activities such as the installation of software without a digital security signature.

1. Windows Me

OK, not so much a feature as a catalogue of disaster. Microsoft’s crowning moment of failure was perhaps Windows Millennium Edition, abbreviated as Me. Released in 2000 and designed to supplant still-popular Windows 98, Windows Me in fact removed as many features as it updated, including real mode MS-DOS (a move to improve boot performance, but dramatically reducing the operating system’s flexibility) and utilities that were considered too business-like for the new OS’s intended home audience, including Active Directory client services, Poledit and Microsoft Personal Web Server.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, upgrading users were more than a bit miffed to find that their new operating system actually did less than the one they’d upgraded from, and it barely lasted a year before being superseded by Windows XP. Windows 2000, the NT-based professional operating system released alongside Me proved to have significantly greater longevity.