File managers, we use them constantly and rarely think of them as anything special. After all - they just work - it’s as simple as that. Of all the file managers out there the default Explorer that has been with Windows since Win95 is probably the most used one on the Windows OS platform.

It didn’t matter that there were always little things about it that irritated us as we used it daily. It’s not like it was a killer app or anything. Even in XP Explorer seemed like an after thought for features and improvements but we kept on using it. Then along comes Vista and rumors that Explorer had seen some serious work done to it.

Well I can tell you that they sure did snazzy up the ol’ interface and gave it some new and slightly cool features but they forgot one thing - some frikken smarts. This version of Explorer has to be the dumbest bucket of code floating around in cyberland. It doesn’t matter how many time you open .. resize to a more viewable window size … close … re-open it still can’t remember it’s last position or size. One minute it will work and then it’ll decide that those settings aren’t good enough.

Forget about it remembering from one session to another the setting for icon and filename display size. It doesn’t matter how many times you set it to large icon display or detail listing display the next time you change to a folder chances the display settings have changed to something other than what you want or expected.

For all the improvements they might have made to Explorer the more I use it the more it is beginning to resemble a pig with with a Friday night hooker’s make-up job on. Which is too bad because for those of us that spend a lot of time using Explorer some of the new features and improvements are nice to have but I would gladly trade them for a bit of smarts.

Conversation Tags: Windows, Vista, Explorer