Title: Members' Experiences

I've noticed a slow down in my system over the last few days, mainly in MSIE, but today it started happening in Windows Explorer too. "Ah" I thought "time to defrag the hard drive". Good plan, so I fire up the Maintenance Wizard, set it going and leave it to it.

Coming back I find it crashed half way though Scandisk. "That's odd" I thought, reset and ran scandisk again. Another crash. Repeat this twice more, I was not impressed. "Fine" I thought, "I'll just do a defrag". No such luck, crashed immediately (twice). Now on Windows systems Scandisk and Defragmenter are crucial to the speedy running of your computer; so why does such mission critical software fail so much? (As I write I still haven't managed to get either working satisfactorily.) Don't even get me started on graphics drivers...

Installing new software is something we all do regularly, so why is it so hard? I have MS Office 2000, and the installer seems to have a constitutional objection to doing its job. I selected "full" installation - five months later I actually have all of Office on my machine. Now this may be a lack of understanding on my part, but I am experienced with computers - if it takes me 5 months to figure out how to carry out a simple(!) operation how on earth would a new user cope? MS still have a lot to learn about user friendliness, but the trouble is will they take the time and effort to learn - or just blunder on thinking (rightly, unfortunately) they are big enough not to care much about the small, inexperienced user?

One of my favourite pastimes is having a go at Microsoft. I never defrag my drives. I get very annoyed with any system that even tries to do it for me. However I keep a spare drive that is large enough to hold a copy of any of my drives. If a drive is getting messy, I copy all the files over to the spare (I do not care if it takes all night) clean up the messy drive, then copy everything back again. This way is slow, but safe. Nothing is trying to rearrange my software & data on the fly. By the time you have a quarter gig of RAM caching makes most programs run as fast as you want.

Now to installation. Microsoft have some irritating habits, but Joe/Jane Public, who does not want anything special gets along with their installs. JP hated OS/2 because they never understood what was happening and shuns Linux because most installations ask techy questions that leave him/her lost for answers. My hate for MS installations is their desire to install features that I do not want on my system. I hate Word turning URLs into active hyperlinks. I do not want Fast Find anywhere near my drives and a certainly loath 'Personal Assistant'. But note that these are features that many non-techy users actually like.