How to make Finder remember its window size and column sizes?

OS X remember the Size of the Finder window and the size of the columns in Cover flow (or any other) view. It seems like something very basic that should just be there. But instead, I have to continuously resize columns to see filenames and resize the window so I can see a reasonable amount of stuff. I know there are script that can allow you to achieve this _manually_, but that's not what I'm looking for.