mhchoate wrote:Hi all ....... but if it said "This system does not support full-screen" -- then that is the truth. If you can't use Alt-Enter and bring up full-screen the first time you open an MS Dos Prompt window in Vista, then IMO they are not SUPPORTing it ... grrr ..... Yes, the message is misleading. Without inside knowledge one gives up.
I don't think I'd go that far. Or rather, like a good scholastic, I would distinguish: to say something is not supported when in fact it is supported, even if with a bit of tweaking, is not accurate. Worse, it is misleading, because it discourages naive people from even trying to see if there is a way to do it. Obviously, I trust Robert more than I do Billg (sorry, Robert, that's not saying much, I know), so I was sure there WAS a way to do it. And once you have tweaked the properties, one can apparently get full screen with ALT-Enter thereafter. It's just like setting any other default.
I don't object to full screen's not being immediately accessible (as I've said before, I prefer to run DOS, whether the command prompt or apps, in windowed mode). But I do vigorously object to the whole "you dumb end-users don't need to know about that" attitude. And this particular error message didn't just NOT tell us there was a way to tweak it; it said (in any but a tortured parsing of the sentence) that there wasn't.
And that is the corporate culture that Gates has encouraged over the years. He may, as Jordan says, have withdrawn from active management, but so long as his name is at the top of the org tree, the buck stops there. I don't absolve his programmers by any means, but they're mostly anonymous. The guy with the name and the profile has to take the heat. Not always fair, perhaps, but how else do we allocate praise or blame?
-- Patricia M. Godfrey PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx