Submission details
Disk Manager desing is very bad and old.
Complete old style - maybe windows 98.
Medium
Medium
Not fixed
Discussion (16 comments)
Well, I would say it is both, may important options are hidden away in right click context menus. I have had to walk so many people through exactly what to do.
Even if a user finds the right option, they tend to be to scared to do anything without confirmation from a techy person. That is just bad UI. I could be as simple as picking a drive like a tab, and seeing all the available options and partitions. Now, you see everyting at once, no room for helper text. Even I have to make sure I am on the right drive, and right partition with a double check.
Ryan - But this stuff SHOULD be scary if you're not a techie person. This is techie UI. Normal users are not expected to ever see it.
Hey, Brandon, this app is still accessible to newbies, and they can mess things up. At least access to this should be made only with admin password. Let's make somehow use of UAC here, OK ?
Or at least Microsoft should provide a safer and simpler alternative to this for newbies ! I guess it's time that this techy - non techy separation should disappear !
I N C O N S I S T E N T W O R K , M I C R O S O F T !
This needs a complete redesign, not just for looks, but overall functions.
I believe this component is licensed from Symantec (formerly Veritas) as a watered down version of Storage Framework for Windows. Microsoft may not have permission or adequate source code to significantly change this part of the management console.
more like a revamp of the program it self.....
The built in defragmenting program is a stripped down version of a program called Diskeeper, if you want to integrate something that you can make look nice and faggy like the rest of vista, go and download Diskeeper and you can match it to your theme, though more importantly, itll do a much better job of defragmenting files and has a load of features thatll help make your computer feel less sluggish.
Brandon - Normal users see it every day, They buy external drives all the time, sometimes even thumb drives need to be configured once through this screen.
I used to be a desktop tech myself - people would always try to set it up themsevles and would often screw it up. It doesnt have to be hard or complicated.
Gotta agree with Brandon, this is *not* normal user territory. It *IS* protected by UAC (at least it is in my Vista install).
By all means, pretty it up (us Techies deserve eye candy lovin' too :) ), but it's not a big issue.
I´d love to have a partition resizing tool with Windows in the future! You can create, delete partition but not able to resize it, even if it is an empty partition...
Any given "normal" user is unlikely to see this screen every day, sure some normal user somewhere will see it, but there are a hell of a lot that wont ever see it
Last time a i looked Diskeeper was payware - the piriform guys just released Defragga (or something like that). Check it out, their CCleaner and Recuva are 2 of my must haves.
Disk manager is an administrator process, using MMC and I do think that it follows the guidelines for such a tool.
@ Brandon:
yeah because looking at Win98 icons is completely scary stuff!
more like 95!
No, this is actually Windows 92 (NT 3.1 beta....)
pndragon wrote on June 4, 2008, 7:21pm
I think you're title is a bit confusing as I came in expecting to see a logical reason why the functionality of the device manager is not making sense and rather it ended up being a graphical quality issue.