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Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
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...I don't like the proposed contract "you can install it on one machine only".
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That is how software has always been though... very few software packages are sold on a license that allows you to run them on multiple computers at once.
Almost always such restrictions have been empty power grabs by contract lawyers which have been ignored in practice, however. Humane companies would not cause a stink, for instance, if you want to install, say, a game both on your desktop and your laptop, etc. XP goes one step further and actually tries to sabotage itself by analyzing your machine, using your Internet connection to phone home to the M$ Mother Ship, etc. That's not a practice I care to support by paying someone hundreds of dollars for XP. No way, Jose.
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The Search is still crap (annoying, clunky and doesn't always work, even once you kill the animated characters)
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It has always worked perfectly for me. I have never had it fail to find a file I was searching for before (unless that file didn't exist, of course). And, it is hardly clunky...
It always amazes me when someone uses "I never noticed a problem" as a counter-argument to "it didn't work for me". Trust us Fryon, there are cases, who knows why, when it just fails to find files that are there. I've tested and had XP search and find nothing, followed by another search program running the same search, which finds files.
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Sorting files by date backwards - any way to fix that?
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Click the sort button for date again, and it reverses the order it sorts them.
Of course you can have it re-sort manually. That's not a fix, though, it's a known work-around.
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There is weird stuff going on with the "My ..." folders
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Get the power toys and you can disable ALL of those folders; just set them to whatever folder you want (even on other drives!) and it stops using them altogether. 
Good to know.
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The "you have some unused icons on your desktop" wizards.
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I don't recall ever seeing that. Can you elaborate?
Sure. You must've turned it off, but by default, every few days or weeks, XP decides to launch a wizard in the user's face, perhaps with a hateful cartoon character and cutesy "speach bubble", saying something like, "Hey, XP has noticed you haven't used some of your desktop icons in a while. Would you like to stop what you're doing, and go through a wizard that asks you about all of them, and gives an option to delete them?" Yeah, there's a way to turn it off, but it's just an example of the many annoying goofball innovations of XP.
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The annoying features I haven't figured out yet how to exorcise from the new "Start Christmas tree".
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Just use the "Classic" start menu, and it is identical to the start menu in 2000 (and I think it is the same as in 98, but with the control panel stuff added, which is a good thing ).
I do that on my own XP box at work, but there is still some crud left over that is not on 2K or 98. And the extra 2K stuff isn't particularly useful, except for disabling as many as possible of the unwanted default processes that launch and waste resources and CPU.
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some accessibility wizards opened by pressing five times the caps key for example
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That is because you chose to set up the accessibility wizards when you installed the OS. Just remove them and that will stop.
Or that were set up by default. The one that keeps happening to me, even on systems where I've told it to stop, is the "Hey, you've been holding down Control for more than five seconds - would you like to enter Accessibility mode?" wizard which attacks and messes up what I was doing at the moment. I suppose it reoccurs because of the frequent "updates" which sometimes reset default system options, such as the existance and IE association of MS Outhouse Express.
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... Or make a Win98 partition to run those old DOS games. Very simply fix.
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Best idea yet. (Though it's incredible that you'd write "Very simple fix" when referring to installing a second OS as a "solution" to a problem with the other OS.) In fact, that's what I have at home: one Win98SE partition, and zero XP. Works perfectly.
PvK