microsoft usability rant for the new year
Looking for a way to encrypt some of my directories and files I remembered that MS offered the Encrypting File System (EFS) in stock Windows. When I got to the “Advanced” dialog the encryption option was greyed out as seen below.
Given the way it’s presented, I assumed it needs to be enabled somewhere, or that I, of course, had done something wrong. After much frustration and searching I found that this feature is not available in WinXP Home edition (that’s what I got with my laptop, so don’t tell me I should have chosen a different OS; if Dell had offered Linux/No-OS I would have chosen that.)
Clearly, Microsoft chose the worst possible way of letting me know this. Given the choice of 1) not showing the option at all, 2) putting a little note saying “not available in this version” or 3) enabling this damn feature… they chose to grey it out. WTF were they thinking? Oh, maybe thinking wasn’t involved here.
What do you use for directory/file/HDD encryption?
January 31st, 2006 at 1:52 pm
Yeah, when I first got my desktop I got Home because at the time their website showed 3 bullets of what Pro had. Well a year or so later I find myself wanting to use EVERY BULLET in some way. I didn’t realize that 3 bullets could cover so many features. They really didn’t try to sell me it, probably because they wanted me to pay even more to upgrade after I found all the grayed check boxes.
When I did do encrypting, I used Encrypted Magic Folders. Since then I’ve gotten an IBM Thinkpad which has some chip in it so if you take the hard drive another computer can’t do anything with the data. Or something like that. Either way I don’t have too much need for encrypting, if someone steals has to steal my website off my hard drive, they probably won’t be able to run it - other wise they’d build it themselves.