Windows Format dialog waited decades for UI revamp that never came Windows has a built-in reminder of the perils of temporary solutions thanks to the 30-year-old porting efforts of former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer. Plummer is well known for beloved and not-so-beloved elements of Microsoft's flagship operating system. While some of his projects, such as the Windows Task Manager, have …
At work, we've long used a term that translates to "temporarily permanent" for a certain type of fixes. You know, the ones that usually get done when the-guy-who-usually-does-this-is-on-a-day-off-but-back-on-Monday-and-I'll-ask-him-to-properly-fix-it-then and you've forgot that you yourself have a day off on Monday; or when a colleague is visiting a remote datacenter needs access to that software image from the internal repository so you just signal up a quick Martini tunnel...
Anon, because, well, I wouldn't want anyone to believe that *I* would do such things...
Ye olde phrase "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"....
Way too many of the changes in Windows fall into that category.
And many of the rest fall into that other infamous category "We need to justify our jobs, quick change something to make us look busy/productive"
> a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn't elegant,
Yes, yes it was elegant: neat, tidy, no guff, sensible, easy to use.
What it wasn't - and, thankfully, isn't - is garish, over-designed, spread out over too many subdialogues or needing to use a search box just to find the option you *hope* is still available.
> constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32 GB.
Ok, unintended side effects are not what you want - OTOH by the time you get to 32GB aren't you glad to be using something a bit more capable[1] than FAT?
[1] hmm, except that FAT is easy enough to patch by hand, with a copy of Norton by your side, so maybe that counts in its favour re getting your data back when things go awry. Choices, choices.
So far as I recall the latest Dells have a utility within the BIOS to download the latest firmware. The Command Update driver utility will also do it from within Windows.
Only time I'd do a BIOS update from a USB stick was if the machine didn't have internet access - but situations like that are very rare now.
> Only time I'd do a BIOS update from a USB stick was if the machine didn't have internet access
Clearly I am way behind the times. I always keep the BIOS images - current and new - available on a.n.other PC and update via memory stick, just so I feel confident I can roll back in case the update - isn't - and the box no longer has 'Net access (or anything else access).
Signed, Mr Dull But Practical.
" I feel confident I can roll back in case the update - isn't - and the box no longer has 'Net access (or anything else access)."
If it will allow a downgrade, I have noticed a disturbing trend of upgrade and sorry about your luck we do not allow that option to downgrade anymore from the scumbag motherboard providers happening more and more.
Most boards still have a rescue or emergency method. Usually by putting a firmware file with a specific name into the root of a FAT32 device, USB sticks mostly these days. The clever ones will usually keep two copies of the firmware and switch to the new one when it's successfully installed but can revert back to the older one if anything goes pear shaped.
Perhaps "FAT32" (sic) meets your need - we may be treating FAT and FAT16 as synonyms. A FAT32 volume can be up to 16TiB capacity, although current Windows (10 and 11) deliberately refuses to format FAT32 larger than 32GiB - though it should have no problem using a larger device.
I have minimal knowledge of PowerShell, which apparently can bypass that limit - as can other tools. PowerShell options include a slow "format" command and a more versatile "Format-Volume" cmdlet, whatever that is. I assume that the slow version is validating empty disk space as it goes.
I'm sceptical about this and also about this 2021 article by Richard: https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/04/windows_format_fat32/
...which includes a statement, contradicting Dave's memory, that Windows NT 4 RTM didn't integrally support FAT32 at all. "A third-party driver by Winternals was required to provide FAT32 support on NT 4. This driver was eventually incorporated into an NT 4 service pack, and Microsoft later acquired Winternals."
"and there is always the command line option 'so you can make a disk as big and inefficient as you'd like, subject to the FAT32 limits'."
I believe that's "yes and no", and it was in Windows XP, in 2001 - or now that I check, it was Windows 2000, in... 2000 (more or less) - where the command-line "FORMAT" program appeared that was unable to format FAT32 larger than 32 GiB. My... impression... is that this was to "force" users to use NTFS for big disks and for Windows 2000/XP itself, if that wasn't enforced anyway - it's a while ago. It was optional for Windows 2000. I think it has to be NTFS now - and presumably the latest incremented version of NTFS. Anyway, why cut out FAT32 > 32 GiB? To make life difficult for people dual-booting, specifically in Linux I'd suppose, also UNIX and anything else - when Linux too would have trouble, to say the least, accessing NTFS. FAT32 was to be the past, the software of embarrassingly small disk partitions. But unfortunately you could get around that.
PowerShell now is an option for formatting bigger FAT32, apparently, but the first PowerShell was released only late in 2006 according to Wikipedia, and it's new-fangled rubbish that I can't be bothered with.
So, no Windows command line option for a larger FAT32. But there was, in Windows 9x. That wasn't a problem.
I found a claimed statement online from 2003 "that Microsoft says this: You cannot format a volume larger than 32 GB in size using the FAT32 file system in Windows 2000. The Windows 2000 FastFAT driver can mount and support volumes larger than 32 GB that use the FAT32 file system (subject to the other limits), but you cannot create one using the Format tool. This behavior is by design. If you need to create a volume larger than 32 GB, use the NTFS file system instead."
By design. "We know you could. But we don't want you to."
I haven't tried to trace this for authentication. But it's what they did.
Also you may remember Microsoft's legal actions to try to stop Linux from accessing FAT16 or FAT32 disks anyway. I think they did get some people to pay out.
My memory was that NT 4 *never* supported FAT32. It definitely didn't on release, and I didn't think it ever supported it.
However it did support FAT16 partitions up to 4GB in size, which no other OS did.
Course, in 96 NT4 lacked USB support too, and the USB sticks and flash media that slowly followed definitely needed more than 32GB FAT32 for various devices.
Dave himself, in the video on that topic, said you can use command line format, and it will format larger than 32 GB fine.
It is REALLY a UI thing.
I think no - it possibly worked in 1994 (give or take the OS supporting FAT32 at all or formatting of it) and then didn't work since 2000.
I don't have a spare drive around to try it on, but according to this: https://superuser.com/questions/151184/format-an-external-hard-disk-to-fat32-only-option-showing-is-ntfs
Answered in 2010: "Execute the following at CMD prompt: format (Drive letter): /FS:FAT32"
Reply in 2020: "I tried to format my 64 GB USB drive using this approach on Windows 10 and it has failed with an error message: The volume is too big for FAT32. Format failed."
Reply in 2023: "Two tips: /Q to speed this up, and also IT DOESN'T WORK. 'The volume is too big for FAT32', useless."
References elsewhere say that the operation erases your volume and chugs away for ages, and evidently THEN says "The volume is too big for FAT32".
I noted that I found references saying that PowerShell has, apparently, two separate or not separate format commands which don't enforce the 32GB limit. And that's a command line, of a sort.
Uh, are you trying to imply that the BIOS was near the 32GB limit for FAT and was in danger of not working? 'Cos that is one huge BIOS!
If not, not sure what the point you are trying to make is. There are lots of old bits of kit that want a FAT - or, more likely, FAT16 or FAT32 - USB stick or memory card. Which is fine.
Sometimes wish the camera made better use of huge cards (wrt naming mostly, as they still stick to 8.3) - then I remember the bleeping Sony camera, which seems to think the SD card is a BluRay for weird reason, and go back to being thankful for simple layouts.
I suppose that it's just considered the lowest common denominator. The efi boot partition on this Linux-only lappy also has to be FAT for some reason. Although, I can't criticise that too much since / is on Butter since any unreliability there is still less than the unreliable of running a rolling release without snapshotting, but I digress.
"Yes, yes it was elegant: neat, tidy, no guff, sensible, easy to use."
It is not bad, and I'll grant easy to use and compact, which are certainly in its favor. But not everything in there is sensible. For example, let's take a look at the fields.
First, we have a capacity box with only one option in it. In modern land, there's only ever one option in it. I can only guess that it's there to deal with floppy disks. Either way, I'm glad I've never had to explain to a user what that's there for. Then, we have a format box which often has only one option, but sometimes has two. More choices here would be useful. The "allocation unit size" box is something I understand, but not explained for anyone who doesn't. Those are your only parameters. We're lucky that this box can't create any complex file system because there's no place to configure extra features of one. Windows does support other filesystems, but they don't expose that to this box.
If you want something with three settings, two of which can't be changed and one of which nobody changes anyway, then writing a simple UI is pretty easy. It's when you want to have more options that it becomes difficult. For example, the nightmare that is trying to get Windows to change a partition table, because it uses a similar theoretically simple UI which is so simple that it would appear not to be able to do anything. There is a reason why I tend to boot Linux and use fdisk whenever I'm partitioning something, then create filesystems on the partitions, also from Linux, then bring the device back to Windows. That is not something that speaks in favor of those UI choices.
"What it wasn't - and, thankfully, isn't - is garish, over-designed, spread out over too many subdialogues or needing to use a search box just to find the option you *hope* is still available."
I hope no one from MS is reading this!!! Once they realise, there will be different and incompatible shiny new GUIs for each different type of device that you want to format, probably two of each, one in Control Panel and another in Settings, which will have different settings layouts and the settings you most need to use will be hidden and only show up in advanced mode, entered by clicking on a pale grey ... menu drawn on a slightly paler grey background.
It's far from the worst piece of UI design still kicking about. The way MMC windows scale for what looks like 640 x 480 monitors means every emergency trawl through an event log begins with setting the window to a usable format first.
The list of ports (IP addresses) on the printer Properties / Ports tab is a mess too - the selected one is always at the bottom of the list, there's not enough lateral space to display the useful bit of the IP address and as soon as you expand it to show that, it knocks the selected line off the bottom of the list. Burying it behind a load of submenus in Windows 11 hasn't helped. Thanks, MS.
The worst I ever had to deal with (thankfully no longer) was the list of mobile phones associated with a user account in Exchange - it was slightly less than one line deep IIRC, floating in a large grey empty dialogue box with space enough for a decent 10 line select. Like a lot of Exchange, it gave the impression it had been thrown together by the work experience kid.
For all their billions, I could pontificate for a month straight on the poor UI choices throughout Windows, getting increasingly worse as time goes on.
If you don't want people to interface, then remove the options entirely.
If you do, put them in a single set of settings that is logical, ordered and doesn't try to hide advanced settings (or if you WANT to hide the advanced settings, have an advanced settings button under which all those options are for the relevant area).
Honestly, give me an hour in a lecture hall with the Windows UI people and give me the power for one month to dictate how they arrange things (I don't care about looks but also... why are themes no longer a thing? Why can't I *make* Windows look like Windows 7 if that's what I want? What is it to Microsoft to let me customise my PC that way after YEARS of them forcing themes down my throat?).
I promise you the world would thank me. Why is the third DNS server on a network interface only adjustable on another tab on the "old" network connection settings? Why are all the options from old official control panel apps NOT exposed in the new Settings interfaces? Why does AD Users & Computers INSIST on unticking Computers every time when you go to Find? Why can't I decide where the taskbar / start menu goes in an official manner as well as a cheap bit of freeware does?
Seriously. One hour. And then I promise you Windows will be more useable when I've finished. Guaranteed.
It's design-by-committee with corporate interests taking precedence and so it's become an absolute trash heap of old, readable, simple, dialogs which are the only way to actually configure things and which the new, fancy, unreadable, you-gotta-search-for-everything "because we said so", unnavigable, incomplete settings dialogs always end up falling back to when those settings need configuring, but fight you every step of the way to make you get there. And that's the PUBLIC-FACING things. The dialogs to deeper things like deployment and RADIUS are atrocious.
If I met someone who worked in Microsoft UI / UX departments and they didn't realise this, they honestly need to get out of that industry before they break anything else. I could understand "We know, but we're not allowed to change anything", that would be acceptable. But to be ignorant of the myriad interface problems in modern Windows, from the second you turn on the machine to the second you turn it off, is just unforgiveable for a professional who is supposed to be catering to the interface to users.
Design by office /corporate politics rather than simply a committee I'd assume.
i.e. "We need a shiny new look. Let's make the scroll bars disappear".
And anyone asking the awkward questions is seen as being negative and "not a team player" when it's annual review time*
From what I've learned about such processes they can stifle common sense, creativity and questioning.
> Let's make the scroll bars disappear
This is one of the many things that ensure I'll never use GNOME as my desktop. A scrollbar is a visual cue that there's more to a window than is currently visible; removing it just makes the interface more confusing and difficult to use for no good reason.
Lee D,
There are three reasons why you can't be allowed access to Microsoft's UI team.
1. Their UI department is almost certainly just a less than infinite number of monkeys. And people can't be allowed to find out.
2. I've known two people who worked for Microsoft and it seems that even for a large multi-national corporation the middle-management office politics is fierce. So even if you get one to let you in, another will block you.
3. Assuming their UI department are actually human, and that all decisions aren't come to by searching through the corpses at committee meetings, and deciphering their final scrawls of committee conclusions in blood on the whiteboard - then that means their UI decisions are actually coming from a human team. At which point workplace health & safety kicks in, as allowing outsiders access to that deparment is likely to result in violence.
It looks like I've opened a can of worms here. Obviously there are many ways to open that can, but all of them leave it half open with poor access to some of the worms and no access to the rest. I should have sold you a tin opener that does the job properly, rather than have you rely on the ring-pull supplied with the can but - despite having years of worm guzzlers testing the tin for me - I didn't spot the half-baked way I'd left it. My bad. Can I interest you in Can O' Worms 12?
I know you were making a largely tongue-in-cheek comment, and you made a few good points, but... You have to remember that a lot of the people using Windows don't know even half as much about computers as you do. They're the sort who would struggle to find the power button even if there was a giant flashing neon arrow pointing right at it. The sort who fall for those tech support scams where they show people the "errors" and "warnings" from the Event Viewer and convince them that means their computer is in need of hundreds of dollars worth of fixes. People who can barely master the power, channel, and volume buttons on a TV remote.
The sad reality is, when you take almost any situation where you think things are unnecessarily complicated, when you really start digging into it, you find there are actually good reasons why things are the way they are. There are the occasional times when you find someone who just slapped something together in a hurry and it stuck, but a lot of times you find that it was a very considered choice because it fit the broadest set of use cases.
I'm guessing you mean my can of worms comment? You've totally got the wrong end of the stick. I'm completely for multiple ways to achieve the same thing, be they dead easy point and click or scriptable commands through PS. What I was aiming at (badly it would seem) is the garbage UI that's all over Windows, as alluded to in my original comment (MMC et al making terrible use of screen space) and some of the comments from people later in the thread.
There are few things that make me pine for Apple, but the MS UX is one of them. Jobs had many, many faults, but he'd rarely let the sort of really basic, stupid, ugly mistakes that we MS users have to put up with get past alpha, never mind beta testing.
> It's far from the worst piece of UI design still kicking about.
All the examples you quote are excellent in their awfulness, but you missed one...
Start menu -> ODBC Data Source Administrator -> User DSN/Add... -> Microsoft Excel Driver/Finish -> Select Workbook...
The whole process is a glorious nostalgia trip ghastly flashback to Windows 3.1, with the 16-bit Win3.x file dialogue box at the end the cherry on the proverbial poop sundae.
To be fair to Microsoft (yes, really) it's not exactly a frequently-trodden part of the UI these days for most users.
My colleague laughed the other day when he saw the Windows Failover Cluster tools on Server 2019 Datacenter for the first time and realised that to move a VM's storage around you are forced to drag-drop in an archaic 3.1-like interface to put the storage, VM config, etc. where you would like it to go.
And some of the other dialogs for certain actions Failover Cluster literally bring up Open dialogs that you can't drag/drop, copy/paste into and have none of the modern Windows explorer structures in there (e.g. Downloads, recently-used, Pinned, etc. folders).
Not one half as annoying, though, as discovering that you can 90% set up the cluster in the GUI but if you want to do certain things with S2D, etc. then you are forced to use the Powershell to get the option you need for the exact same commands.
"should be
"Thirty years on, and we're still waiting for that "elegant OS.""
Really should be
Forty years on and we still have not one single fucking CLUE how to do security correctly. But yet you morons continue to shovel bucket loads of money at us to be beta testers.
They said the same about Windows 95.
It turned out to be DOS 7, which could do long file names, the Win32S subsystem that could already be installed in Windows 3, the networking from Windows 3.11 and a new shell.
Of course, for the average user the new shell *was* the operating system. So it was kind of true.
-A.
Much like the Task Manager he built, despite it's age the fact that it still works this many years after it was built, and in fact works better than many newer utilities, shows how sometimes simple just make it work and do what needs done is the best way. If it didn't work well, someone would have replaced it, but since it works even if it isn't pretty by today's standards, no one feels the need to redo it.
Every .exe file starts with an MZ header which is a DOS program stub, so logically it would seem entirely plausible that some fossil remnant of the original DOS code might still be present.
If so, though, it would be wholly redundant on a 64-bit system. DOS code is, perforce, 16-bit, and won't directly run on a 64-bit edition of Windows. So that completely precludes the 64-bit-only Windows 11.
-A.
Think of how many features in Windows are hard-wired into NTFS, and don’t work with any other file system--like mount points and symlinks, and even bootability.
AT&T Unix acquired the concept of a “file system switch” back in the 1980s, and Sun and the other vendors picked that up and ran with it. Today, Linux has its pluggable VFS layer, which allows supporting a whole range of filesystems on an equal basis. That is one feature that would be useful to add to Windows, don’t you think? Imagine being able to interoperate with Linux-specific filesystems as easily as Linux can interoperate with Windows-specific filesystems.
Only the Windows code has by now become so convoluted and fragile that they would risk breaking too many things if they tried it.
I try to avoid Windows and similar types of systems because of the constant improvements. They seem to be what happens when some relatively junior programmer gets tasked with tidying up some loose end or another and decides that they need to totally redesign it. This is partly the fault of fashion -- the old stuff was obviously not designed using the 'right' techniques or tools and 'the latest' is always better. All too often the actual working bit doesn't get touched, its not obvious to a person who does UIs how it works and its probably in a DLL anyway, so we end up with a half-assed 'improved' labrinthine UI that -- assuming you can figure it out -- does more or less exactly the same job as the original.
Meanwhile, some of us are just trying to get some work done.
Exhibit 'A' for me is the Windows "File Explorer" tool -- I can't believe that a simple directory display program can be made so convoluted and messy. Every time I have to use a new version its more convoluted, hides more (important) information. Its a mess. (But then the system tools ....... Ugh!.......fortunately they're often just naff front ends for tihe original programs.) (And, while we're about it, they're "Directories", not "Folders"....)
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