h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In addition to all its other failings, from a design standpoint - who thinks it's idiotic to place the 'shutdown' command in the 'start' menu?

How do you explain to somebody who is a bit of a technophobe and convinced that they'll never understand computers this bit if design brilliance?

Mum: OK, so how do I turn this thing off?
Me: Well, you need to click where it says start...
Mum: To turn it off I go to start?
Me: Err, yes...
Mum: I'm never going to understand this thing...

Simply awesome design there.
*punches PC*

I think you'll find that everybody thinks it's idiotic except the idiot at Microsoft who designed it.

I do not work for Microsoft, nor do I like Windows, but where do you suggest putting the shutdown command?

Maybe you shouldn't change where the button is but the name of the start menu. It makes very little sense.

There are numerous programs like TweakUI that allow you to change this button's text. What would you replace it with?

If you were to just rename the start menu 'menu' it would be an improvement. Or just 'click here'. Or 'options'. Or how about a second button, called 'shutdown'?

There's lots of things they might have done, but clicking something called 'start' in order to stop is silly.

The fact that it often means freeze, and not shutdown, is dealt with elsewhere in this forum.

Ooh, simulpost! And I gave an answer to your question, Duncan, before I knew what it was. Spooky!

The problem with using a program is that the people who need it most probably won't be able to use it when they first need it (i.e when they have the computer new, just from the box).

As for a name, anything suggested just above would be better. I can't think of much else right now.

That's a good point - and an excellent reason to put a separate 'help' button on the taskbar. It could easily be configured so that experienced users could turn it off. It could contain information such as how to turn the computer off!

As I posted elsewhere on this thread, I suspect that pressing "Start" to shut down is a hangover from the days of DOS prompts which used to say "Press Enter to Exit."

I think it gets worse the more you use it, I find it really sad when I see these poor non-technical people get one of microsofts really technical error messages and then it asks them what they want to do. The looks of pain and confusion imediately apear and they start looking around for the least embaressing person to ask for help.