NationStates Jolt Archive

Well I discovered something this weekend. Vista, unlike XP allows you to effectively format your computer using the "Disk Cleanup" utility. Like I usually did w/ XP, I just clicked on all the buttons since it just did the recycle bin, list files, etc. I stopped it before it deleted everything when I saw my shortcuts disappear on my desktop.

It still took me several hours to get the operating system functioning again but I still lost a lot of stuff that I unfortunately hadn't backed up in awhile.

What a lovely weekend.

Sounds to me like a PEBKAC issue.

People use the Disk Cleanup utility?:eek:

OT, I find it rather odd that it did clean your disk so extensively. While I can't be bothered to boot Vista just for this, I'll ask: Was one of the options you ticked "rm -r *"?

Well I discovered something this weekend. Vista, unlike XP allows you to effectively format your computer using the "Disk Cleanup" utility. Like I usually did w/ XP, I just clicked on all the buttons since it just did the recycle bin, list files, etc. I stopped it before it deleted everything when I saw my shortcuts disappear on my desktop.

It still took me several hours to get the operating system functioning again but I still lost a lot of stuff that I unfortunately hadn't backed up in awhile.

What a lovely weekend.

get a mac.

People use the Disk Cleanup utility?:eek:

OT, I find it rather odd that it did clean your disk so extensively. While I can't be bothered to boot Vista just for this, I'll ask: Was one of the options you ticked "rm -r *"?

I think the ones that did it were the "Per user"'s and the "system error" options.

Sounds to me like a PEBKAC issue.
I think that's a little cruel. One of the oldest usability guidelines is to make interfaces consistent, as people assume that if something looks the same then it will function the same. I keep being caught out by one of the programs I use on my computer (a hex editor), which asks 'Do you want to exit without saving?' if you click the close button without saving - this means that the 'yes' and 'no' buttons have the opposite effect from within every other application (which ask 'Do you want to save before exiting?').

get a mac.
Then your hard disk ends up full of .DS_Store files. The damned things even create then on network drives running non-Mac file systems.

I think that's a little cruel. One of the oldest usability guidelines is to make interfaces consistent, as people assume that if something looks the same then it will function the same. I keep being caught out by one of the programs I use on my computer (a hex editor), which asks 'Do you want to exit without saving?' if you click the close button without saving - this means that the 'yes' and 'no' buttons have the opposite effect from within every other application (which ask 'Do you want to save before exiting?').
Coincidentally, I've just stumbled across an article on this very issue:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/neveruseawarning