Why does Bluetooth in windows suck

[andrewjoy]

I don't get it. No matter what USB dongle you buy they all have different problems.

There is no Bluetooth program for windows like there is on say Macintosh or your phone, there is a Bluetooth file transfer window that does nothing.

Why is there not a simple window i can go to where it lists my Bluetooth module and i can scan for devices just like on my phone or a mac.

Pathetic!

[Halvar]

What do you mean?

[andrewjoy]

that windows 8.1 ?

nothing in 7

[Mal-2]

that windows 8.1 ?

nothing in 7

No?

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... r-computer

[seebart]

Mal-2 and Halvar are right, but plug and play may not work in your case andrew.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

that windows 8.1 ?

nothing in 7

You're complaining about an outdated version of an operating system? :)

Your topic title didn't indicate that older versions of Windows sucked. I've had Windows 8 now for over two years, and Windows 7 goes back to 2009!

[Muirium]

Someday, maybe… in the meantime, Andy's quite right. You bleeding edge guys with your risky two year old OSes! (Says I on months old Yosemite…) Windows 7 is the most popular version, and increasing!


http://arstechnica.com/information-tech ... -november/

Obsolete never got in the way of PCs.

[seebart]

To an apple user no version of windows will ever be "cutting edge".[emoji16]

[andrewjoy]

that windows 8.1 ?

nothing in 7

You're complaining about an outdated version of an operating system?

Your topic title didn't indicate that older versions of Windows sucked. I've had Windows 8 now for over two years, and Windows 7 goes back to 2009!

and windows 2000 goes back 15 years and that's still better than windows 8. 8.1 is a bit better.

[Halvar]

... yeah, except for Bluetooth support, right?

[7bit]

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[Daniel Beardsmore]

and windows 2000 goes back 15 years and that's still better than windows 8. 8.1 is a bit better.

Let's see. If we went back to 2000, we'd have:

• No firewall of any kind
• No RDP session host — you cannot natively remote into a Windows 2000 computer except through Telnet if you have that enabled
• Task Manager borderline useless
• Notepad was too broken to use — Microsoft couldn't even ship a simple text editor that worked
• Permanent taskband size grips: locking the taskbar wasn't conceived yet (and with a top taskbar in particular it was too easy to accidentally drag the taskbar by mistake)
• 16-colour tray icons (not 16-bit, 16 colour)
• 16- or 24-bit icons everywhere else: jagged edges on icons abounded
• No ClearType, giving you really hard to read italics in many fonts
• No program search under Start — you had to rummage around to find things, and as you know, new program groups were never added in alphabetical order; this in particular was not keyboard friendly
• No Control Panel search — you had to know the exact name of the relevant control panel applet to find the setting you need
• Excessive reliance on global file type and program association: associating a program with a file type or protocol would overwrite any change made by any other user on that computer; Windows 8 has safeguards to stop that from happening
• No live user switching: only one concurrent login session
• Constant flicker: nothing could be dragged or resized without violent flickering, largely due to apathy; the Mac never offered a solution either, but developers made the effort to off-screen buffer all their window updates such that you never saw flicker on Macs (sadly it's still possible to write programs so badly in Windows that you still get resize flicker)

No doubt there are hundreds more things about Windows 2000 that you'd be shocked to discover if you went back. I've used 2000 in past years, and there's nothing remotely appealing about it. Windows has improved a huge amount since then. I wouldn't call Windows 2000 better than any version of Windows — it was still pretty primitive.

I'll give you one thing: since 7 or Vista, it's impossible to allow users to install fonts without being an administrator; this was trivial in XP and presumably also 2000.

Windows 7's UI is arguably the best for more technical folk. My biggest gripes about 8.1 are that the Start menu search is really slow (while it was extremely fast in 8 — 8.1 has gone back to the annoying slow search of Windows 7 and then some) and that MS took away the little network connection applet that sat in the tray — the new connection sidebar is fugly. This is mostly a pain for mobile users who need to switch wireless sessions or enable VPNs.

I love old 80s technology, especially the BBC Micro, which for its day was extremely impressive, but I wouldn't want to go back now. We can bring 80s keyboards to the 2010s, but you can't bring 2010s technology back to the 80s.

[seebart]

... yeah, except for Bluetooth support, right?

among "a few" other details yes. Sounds to me like your working in a real life sandbox Andrew, and win 2000 might actually be just perfect for you.[emoji85] [emoji86] [emoji87]

Windows NT is the mother of all ms OS's since win 2000. 95, 98 and ME were a disaster much like Apple OS before OSX.

[Halvar]

2014 - the year of the Linux Raspi.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Windows NT is the mother of all ms OS's since win 2000. 95, 98 and ME were a disaster much like Apple OS before OSX.

Depends how you define "disaster" — classic Mac OS was eye-opening. There was a lot of very impressive software engineering and intelligent design in those older Mac systems. Unfortunately too many people never took the time to learn them and soak in all the wisdom they contained, and it shows in the state of the industry.

[Hak Foo]

I always suspected that Apple burned through a lot of resources on false starts, especially in the pre-OSX days.

For example, they did an abortive port to x86 before going with PowerPC.

All those "next version of MacOS will have preemptive multitasking, for reals this time", efforts.

So what did actually make it out the door was done on limited resources.