creedo299
Epochal Historian
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1768864,00.asp
The Response to My Letter to Gates
02.23.05
By Lance Ulanoff
My recent open letter to Bill Gates on the sometimes sorry state of WinTel PCs (my own in particular) generated a lot of thoughtful responses in our forums and a steady stream of e-mails to my own desktop. They were spilt roughly into thirds among the people who blamed me for abusing my own system by demanding too much of it, those who agreed that there were fundamental system issues at work here (like the overly complex and probably garbage-ridden Registry), and those who, whenever I write about WinTel PCs, tell me I ought to switch to a Mac, and then all my troubles would magically disappear. I find a bit of truth in all of these arguments.
First of all, as one reader warned me, I probably should start turning my PC, an IBM ThinkPad T40, off at night. Yes, I'm behind both hardware and software firewalls and I run antispyware, antivirus, and antispam applications, but I guess I could be looking for trouble by leaving my PC on and connected 24/7. So that's a fair argument. It still doesn't explain why, even after rebooting, my system will experience heart palpitations around three-fourths of the way through the day. And I have to admit that the other reason I leave my computer on is the same as what forum member "monty0000" noted: "I leave my desktop on for days at a time mainly because I do not want to take the time to wait for a couple minutes while the computer reboots." And a couple minutes' wait is at the low end of the scale. Microsoft Windows is supposed to be able to handle concurrent processes, but startup appears to be a largely serial affair, and the more you have in your Startup folder, the longer Windows XP's launch process takes. Another reader told me to put my system in "hibernate" mode between usage sessions. I typically use "Standby," but I'm willing to try something different.
The root or roots of my problems, according to some readers, is the way Windows handles processes and an overloaded Registry. They offered salient advice. One reader, Svein Liby of Bergen, Norway, bemoaned the lack of "smart Registry maintenance" and recommended I try TuneUp Utilities 2004 from TuneUp Software GmbH. Others agreed with my stance on the Task Manager, but recommended that I use it to cancel "processes" instead of "applications." Of course, that approach means that all open files associated with an application are shut down at once. Closing applications usually lets me address a single instance of an application. Either way, the Task Manager, on its own, simply doesn't work that well. —The Response to My Letter to Gates
One of the more interesting reasons I heard for my system's occasional sluggishness centers on the hard drive. Forum member "stephenvv" suggested I get a 7,200-rpm drive for my ThinkPad T40. Apparently, its existing 5,400-rpm drive just isn't good enough. He also noted that I should regularly clean out my temp (Internet and otherwise) files. That makes sense, but as he noted and I agree, Windows ought to do this for you automatically.
Another member, "Garyml," reported that ThinkPads ship with a special feature enabled called "Rapid Restore." It monitors the system for data and system-configuration changes and even stores backup files in a "hidden partition." Garyml adds that this feature can have the unfortunate consequence of slowing down your system. The Rapid Restore feature exists on my system, but, sorry Garyml, I never installed it.
OSNews.com editor-in-chief Eugenia Loli-Queru warned me that all the apps I run could even bring down the Mac OS or make a Linux box look bad. She counseled me that I should get more memory. Another reader told me that he has a gigabyte of RAM on his T40 and still suffers from similar issues. Loli-Queru had an answer for both of us: "If these apps actually bring down the PC after the passage of time, it just means that these apps are *leaking* memory. Again, not Win XP's fault, but the respective app programmer's." So, I guess I should be angry at the programmers. But wait. If more than half the apps I run are from Microsoft, then it all points back to Gates anyway.
Other readers helpfully suggested I dump WeatherBug (www.weatherbug.com) and also start looking at alternatives to Microsoft applications. I have tried other Office suites (with very mixed results) and am now running Firefox 1.0, an Internet Explorer browser alternative. I have to say, however, that I have noted some speed issues with Mozilla's much-lauded upstart browser.
Then there are those who slammed me for using a Windows-based system in the first place. These were almost all current Mac users who either gently explained how wonderfully their Apple hardware and software worked, or called me various names and told me to shut up and switch to a Mac. I'm not really sure what the latter group is so angry about, but their calls for me to switch are, for the most part, reasonable and well thought out. One guy did offer a different and, to me, somewhat surprising Windows alternative: OS/2 v4.52. Heck I didn't even know you could still get OS/2. It's a thought, but then, I'm not that warped.
Discuss this article in the forums.An Open Letter to Bill Gates
01.18.05 Total posts: 96
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
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…."
ordaj: It's a terrible chore having to babysit your PC...
view full post >
DragonMouth: There are many other OSes...
view full post >
inoddy: ...you can hibernate between sessions.
view full post >
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. An Open Letter to Bill Gates
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.
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
The Response to My Letter to Gates
02.23.05
By Lance Ulanoff
My recent open letter to Bill Gates on the sometimes sorry state of WinTel PCs (my own in particular) generated a lot of thoughtful responses in our forums and a steady stream of e-mails to my own desktop. They were spilt roughly into thirds among the people who blamed me for abusing my own system by demanding too much of it, those who agreed that there were fundamental system issues at work here (like the overly complex and probably garbage-ridden Registry), and those who, whenever I write about WinTel PCs, tell me I ought to switch to a Mac, and then all my troubles would magically disappear. I find a bit of truth in all of these arguments.
First of all, as one reader warned me, I probably should start turning my PC, an IBM ThinkPad T40, off at night. Yes, I'm behind both hardware and software firewalls and I run antispyware, antivirus, and antispam applications, but I guess I could be looking for trouble by leaving my PC on and connected 24/7. So that's a fair argument. It still doesn't explain why, even after rebooting, my system will experience heart palpitations around three-fourths of the way through the day. And I have to admit that the other reason I leave my computer on is the same as what forum member "monty0000" noted: "I leave my desktop on for days at a time mainly because I do not want to take the time to wait for a couple minutes while the computer reboots." And a couple minutes' wait is at the low end of the scale. Microsoft Windows is supposed to be able to handle concurrent processes, but startup appears to be a largely serial affair, and the more you have in your Startup folder, the longer Windows XP's launch process takes. Another reader told me to put my system in "hibernate" mode between usage sessions. I typically use "Standby," but I'm willing to try something different.
The root or roots of my problems, according to some readers, is the way Windows handles processes and an overloaded Registry. They offered salient advice. One reader, Svein Liby of Bergen, Norway, bemoaned the lack of "smart Registry maintenance" and recommended I try TuneUp Utilities 2004 from TuneUp Software GmbH. Others agreed with my stance on the Task Manager, but recommended that I use it to cancel "processes" instead of "applications." Of course, that approach means that all open files associated with an application are shut down at once. Closing applications usually lets me address a single instance of an application. Either way, the Task Manager, on its own, simply doesn't work that well. —The Response to My Letter to Gates
One of the more interesting reasons I heard for my system's occasional sluggishness centers on the hard drive. Forum member "stephenvv" suggested I get a 7,200-rpm drive for my ThinkPad T40. Apparently, its existing 5,400-rpm drive just isn't good enough. He also noted that I should regularly clean out my temp (Internet and otherwise) files. That makes sense, but as he noted and I agree, Windows ought to do this for you automatically.
Another member, "Garyml," reported that ThinkPads ship with a special feature enabled called "Rapid Restore." It monitors the system for data and system-configuration changes and even stores backup files in a "hidden partition." Garyml adds that this feature can have the unfortunate consequence of slowing down your system. The Rapid Restore feature exists on my system, but, sorry Garyml, I never installed it.
OSNews.com editor-in-chief Eugenia Loli-Queru warned me that all the apps I run could even bring down the Mac OS or make a Linux box look bad. She counseled me that I should get more memory. Another reader told me that he has a gigabyte of RAM on his T40 and still suffers from similar issues. Loli-Queru had an answer for both of us: "If these apps actually bring down the PC after the passage of time, it just means that these apps are *leaking* memory. Again, not Win XP's fault, but the respective app programmer's." So, I guess I should be angry at the programmers. But wait. If more than half the apps I run are from Microsoft, then it all points back to Gates anyway.
Other readers helpfully suggested I dump WeatherBug (www.weatherbug.com) and also start looking at alternatives to Microsoft applications. I have tried other Office suites (with very mixed results) and am now running Firefox 1.0, an Internet Explorer browser alternative. I have to say, however, that I have noted some speed issues with Mozilla's much-lauded upstart browser.
Then there are those who slammed me for using a Windows-based system in the first place. These were almost all current Mac users who either gently explained how wonderfully their Apple hardware and software worked, or called me various names and told me to shut up and switch to a Mac. I'm not really sure what the latter group is so angry about, but their calls for me to switch are, for the most part, reasonable and well thought out. One guy did offer a different and, to me, somewhat surprising Windows alternative: OS/2 v4.52. Heck I didn't even know you could still get OS/2. It's a thought, but then, I'm not that warped.
Discuss this article in the forums.An Open Letter to Bill Gates
01.18.05 Total posts: 96
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
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…."
ordaj: It's a terrible chore having to babysit your PC...
view full post >
DragonMouth: There are many other OSes...
view full post >
inoddy: ...you can hibernate between sessions.
view full post >
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. An Open Letter to Bill Gates
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.
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
