Wizards

The wizards I see on a day to day basis don't go to Hogwarts. They live on my computer, and do things like installing applications.

Once upon a time, I used to carefully check every option on each wizard - the option wouldn't be there if it wasn't important, right?

So I'd agonize over which help files to include with spybot, and worry about whether I'd be missing out if I didn't include additional skins for winamp.

But after a while, the wizards start to get in the way. So what if German help files are installed on my computer and I don't speak German? Winamp in it's entirety is only a few megs - what am I saving if I carefully untick the "additional skins" checkbox?

So how about instead of presenting me with lots of options to tweak and adjust to my liking, why not just install with the defaults, and hide the optional extras out of the way for power users to dig out for themselves?

These days, I tend to click-click-click the next button until it does what I want it to do.

It doesn't work for the Zip extraction wizard in Windows XP though. When I tell a file to extract, first it tells me it's an extraction wizard (well duh!), then it asks me where I want to extract to (defaulting to the folder that contains the zip file - that's good enough for me), then it starts extracting. But the next button is still enabled. Which means I can start extracting into the same location again and again. But that upsets the wizard because he doesn't want to overwrite the files he's already written.

So I have to be careful when I play with the extraction wizard.

I'm sure there's a moral to the tale in there somewhere...