1FPS|by David Chartier

I’m starting a new series at 1FPS preliminarily titled “Vistupidity.” I’m writing about Windows stuff a little more often for Ars Technica, which means I usually fire up Vista in either Boot Camp or Parallels/VMware to test something and grab screenshots. Now the Ars pieces are, of course, about whatever product I’m reviewing, so I can’t start harping on Vista or Microsoft’s dreadful decisions in the piece itself.

But that’s where “Vistupidity” here at 1FPS will come in. When I run into these virtual insults to computer user intelligence and perhaps humanity itself, I’ve been making notes and saving screenshots for a rainy day, and I think this is it. Sometimes these posts may be long explorations of the usability problems I find in Vista, and others—like this opening piece—may simply be a short mention of a silly problem that perhaps doesn’t need much discussion at all. I make no guarantee on how often I’ll have a Vistupidity piece, though. It’s not like I make a point to hop into Vista without an assignment. But thanks to the cross-platform wonders of Evernote, I have all the screenshot-snapping and note-taking tools I need to easily keep track of these experiences, so we’ll see how things go.

That said, here’s a Vistupidity icebreaker for #1: Internet Explorer 8 beta. No, it isn’t just for Vista, but that doesn’t make the screenshot above any less silly. This was shot during the IE8 installation process, which I started immediately after finishing the download from Microsoft’s site. Hardwired into the installation process, however, is an “Installing updates” step—for a brand new application.

Are Microsoft’s developers working on IE8 so often, and official updates appearing nearly every minute, to warrant a full-blown “installing updates” step during the IE8 installation process? Should the version I just downloaded be, well, the latest version?

The update step took around 1:30-2 minutes all by itself, but I never saw what the updates were. It just sat there with the continually rotating progress bar that, in reality, doesn’t reveal a single thing about the actual progress of the installation.