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Bug of the moment 2008-07-27


One of the curious complaints I hear about Vista is that the Run menu item has been taken away. Obviously these people aren’t aware of the simple Win+R shortcut for this that’s been around for decades. Incidentally, if command () and option () get their own Unicode symbols, how come the Windows key does not?

The most useful thing to do with the Run dialog is to start cmd. However, performing Run and then cmd in Vista produces the following bizarre dialog box:

There may be a logic to this if cmd.com existed, but it does not. In Vista, it’s necessary to specify cmd.exe to get cmd to launch. On this computer anyway – I was sure this normally worked in Vista!

I am keeping an open mind about Vista, but the number of small things that just don’t work is beginning to grate on me. For example, Microsoft took the telnet command away, despite it being invaluable for port probing and protocol testing.

Vista won’t kill me, but it will take some getting used to.

Apologies for the horrible screenshot – I took a screenshot of my own desktop by mistake instead of the remote desktop.


Posted 27th July 2008 – Comments and questions?