Mike O'Connor wrote:

>Hi All.
>
>Interesting to note the last paragraph of the story at :
>
>http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1768864,00.asp>
>
>  
>
This was the original [PCMag] "Open letter to Bill Gates" referred to in 
the above:
    
An Open Letter to Bill Gates
01.18.05

By Lance Ulanoff

Dear Bill,

It's the beginning of January 2005 and we have, thanks to your company 
and others like it, come a very, very long way since the days of the 
Commodore 64. I am thankful for this and am happy that I have computers 
at home and at work to make my life easier and more productive. But 
underneath this bliss is the continual, nagging, daily frustration of 
things simply not working as they should. I've listed my top 10 computer 
frustrations below. I present them to you in the hope that you can 
address them in future versions of Microsoft's most popular products.

1) System Resources Are Never Enough
I have a good work laptop, with a 1.6-GHz Pentium M CPU, 512MB DDR 
SDRAM, 80GB hard drive, and an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 graphics chip. I 
think it has decent power and, in looking at your Web site, I have to 
assume you do, too. Here are your system requirements for Windows XP Pro:

    PC with 300 megahertz or higher processor clock speed recommended, 
233 MHz minimum required (single or dual processor system); Intel 
Pentium/Celeron family, or AMD K6/Athlon/Duron family, or compatible 
processor recommended; 128 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher recommended 
(64MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features); 1.5 
gigabytes (GB) of available hard disk space; Super VGA (800 x 600) or 
higher-resolution video adapter and monitor; CD-ROM or DVD drive

ADVERTISEMENT By these measures, I have a screamingly well-equipped 
Windows system. As a result, it's not unusual for me to open at least a 
half-dozen Internet Explorer browsers, six Word documents, three Excel 
files, eight notepad docs, Photoshop, AIM, and maybe even Weather Bug. I 
am, after all, a power user. The good news is that it all will run fine 
for a time. But I have a habit of leaving my computer on for days at 
time. I work in the office and at home, and, guess what? The specs I 
outlined above? They're not enough. I regularly run out of system 
resources. Usually the system doesn't tell me this explicitly, but it's 
obvious to me from the way it performs-super-slow response times, 
clicking on a Word document and nothing happening, etc.

2) Time for More Detailed Explanations
Sometimes, when my system stops responding-it isn't really locked, mind 
you, just busy-I often see Microsoft Word, Outlook, and Internet 
Explorer boxes blinking orange in the taskbar. They're obviously doing 
something, but I cannot restore them. This usually doesn't happen until 
the system is done doing whatever it's doing. Bill, have you ever 
thought about a continuous scrolling message bar for system activity? It 
would say things like: "Shutting down Word Doc: 'Dear Bill'; Background 
saving Excel file 'Traffic.xls'; Making call on Port 79?."

3) Even When You Do Tell Me, You Really Don't
If my system has lapsed into some sort of unresponsive state, I usually 
resort to CTRL-ALT-DELETE to raise the login control box and access the 
taskbar. Unfortunately, when I click on the taskbar button, I only have 
a 50-50 chance of the Task Manager showing up. It should appear 100 
percent of the time.

4) The Information You Offer Isn't Always Useful
When my taskbar does appear and I try to see what's killing my system, 
the top resource hogs are invariably Word, Outlook, and IE. I can't kill 
these applications, because I'm using them heavily. If I can't kill the 
processes that appear to be slowing down my system, I'm stuck. Now 
that's frustrating!

5) Sometimes, It Eats My Files
My IBM T40 has wireless built?in, and I regularly undock the system to 
travel to meetings throughout the office. I do not stop to close down 
all of my files. Remember, I can have a half-dozen Word documents open 
at once. Every once in a while, the transition from wired to wireless 
networks and back mangles all the Word files on my desktop. And I mean 
mangles them. Even though I haven't saved anything between the desktop 
and the meeting room, half of each document has been turned into some 
sort of unreadable encoding. I have lost a lot of work this way. The 
good news is that if I save before undocking, the stored version of my 
file is fine. I just can't save what's currently on my desktop

6) Word Can Drag Outlook Down
Outlook is an okay e-mail client and gains some very useful 
functionality from Word. But because I let Word act as my e-mail editor, 
my entire e-mail system can be brought down if and when Word gets the 
hiccups. Is there a way, Bill, for Word to die quietly in the background 
without affecting Outlook? Or maybe it's time to improve the Outlook 
text editor and leave Word out of it altogether.
ADVERTISEMENT

7) Dopey Smart Tags
I hate smart tags. They pop up on top of my document, offer no useful 
purpose, and can sometimes block text I need to see. What's worse is 
that I cannot remove them once they appear. You made it easy to turn 
them off-thank you-but why include such an annoying and useless feature 
in the first place?

8) Useless Messages
One day, with my system moving slower than a child on his way to the 
dentist, a message popped up telling me my hard drive was nearly full. 
This was shocking, since the last time I looked, I had at least half of 
my 80GB hard drive still available. I right-clicked on the drive and 
found, as I suspected, almost half of it free. So what exactly did that 
message mean? Speaking of useless messages, have you ever tried to use 
the "End Now" dialog box that appears when you try and stop an 
application through Task Manager? It only works, I'd say, 30 percent of 
the time. I usually have to go through the cycle of selecting the 
process, hitting End Now and then hitting OK in the "This program has 
stopped responding End Now" dialog box three or four times to "kill" 
(and I mean kill) the app. When things go really wrong and Windows wants 
to tell me it has recovered from a serious error that it wants to report 
back to the mother ship, I usually decline. I did so in the beginning, 
but I never get a message back or any sort of solution to my problem, so 
what's the point?

9) Windows/Word/IE PC Collects Way Too Much Garbage
Recently, my system slowed down to an unusable level, and had all the 
earmarks of a PC with little or no disk space left. A right-click on my 
hard drive showed gigabytes of space still remaining, but I decided that 
some disk cleanup would probably help the situation. I right-clicked on 
my C: drive and selected "Disk Cleanup." A dialog window popped up 
telling me it was checking to see what could be cleaned up. It told me, 
among other things, that I had 126MB of temporary Internet files, 367MB 
of temporary files, 4GB of compressed old files, and 2.5GB of offline 
files. It offered to delete all the temporary files, which sounded good. 
If I wanted, it could also throw in the offline files, but that was my 
local backup of my network-based My Documents folder (I synchronize my 
desktop with the network everyday) and includes virtually all my most 
important files-I wonder why Windows did not know this. In any case, I 
opted for a temp-file cleanup. But why so many files? Why must 
everything be saved to the system and under so many nested folders? This 
just seems like a mess, and though cleaning it up does free up some 
space, it really shouldn't be enough to affect system performance. Why, 
for example, does a stuffed Internet Explorer Temporary directory-even 
on the largest hard drive-slow down Web browsing so much?

10) Nothing Is Lean or Smart Enough
Outlook, Word, IE, and Windows are all big, complicated software 
products. Don't you think it's time to streamline everything? I know 
that Windows has to do Herculean work to support thousands of apps and 
various kinds of hardware, but you've done a lot of work in the last 
eight years or so to simplify all that, so that it's the manufacturers' 
responsibility to make it work with your software and not the other way 
around. Isn't it time for a leaner, smarter Windows, Outlook, Word, and 
IE? You can make this happen. You have the power to give us desktop PCs 
and notebooks that run light, cleanly, and without failing.

Thanks for listening, Bill. Have a great 2005 and, oh, by the way, I 
missed your holiday card this year. Oh well. Give my best to Melinda and 
the kids.

All the best,
-Lance

-- 
Regards,
Mike

Failed the exam for
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MCSE - Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert
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