Barry Fox

Is it really beyond the wit of mankind to put a warning message on screen when the little back-up battery that is buried inside every PC motherboard starts to go flat?

I ask because yet again I have been caught out, and spent days looking for a fault that only sometimes stopped my XP Dell dead in its tracks.

The little battery or button cell is there to trickle power into the chips that store the PC's vital set-up settings, along with the internal clock time and date.

The battery should last for several years, but this depends on how often the PC is left unplugged and how hard the battery has to work.

When it goes flat the PC loses the time and date and forgets what hard drive it has. So the PC has to auto-detect the drive, or be put through the Bios set-up routine. It may then work for a while before losing its memory again.

Over the years I've seen PCs lose their date and time before losing the vital set-up settings. This time I got intermittent refusal to boot, but with time and date still accurate.

Because I had recently changed hard drives and DVD burners I blamed my changes and swapped everything back and forth a few times before I twigged.

All it needed, Mr Dell, was an itsy bitsy error message on screen at boot-up: 'Early Warning: Your Backup Button Cell Needs Replacing Soon.'

This and a few other incidents got me thinking. Do any of the suits who make and sell PC stuff ever use their own kit without a tame IT expert on hand? Do they ever try and buy what they sell?

Pinnacle's new Instant CD/DVD burning software is so packed with features, it needs a 300-page manual to explain them. But the customer has to spend an age and a fortune printing it from the CD-Rom.

Powerquest's Drive Image for backup and Partition Magic for hard disk can both give a similar error message: 'Pmagic9X/Driveimage9X has caused an error in Pmagic9X/Driveimage9X.exe. PMagicX/Driveimage9X will now close.'

Which is a lot like saying: 'The engine in your car has caused a problem with your car's engine. You and your car will now stop. If you don't like it, buy another make of car.'

OK then, I'll use Norton. How many times have you started a lengthy routine, like back-up, defragging or disk copying, then gone out for the evening, expecting to return home later and find it all finished?

When, instead, there is a message on screen that asks a question, such as: '89% not fragmented, do you want to continue?'; 'Overwrite previous backup file?'; 'Read-only file, click OK to copy'.

Of course those questions have to be asked, but surely the software could launch with the option: 'If you understand the risks, click here to proceed without interruption.'

Anyone who uses an inkjet printer and buys their own paper will know that there is a huge range of different types: glossy, premium, matte, glossy film and so on. All this paper has two things in common: it is expensive, and it gives good results only if used the right way round.

Todd Hamblin, Lexmark's director of marketing and strategy, stated recently that around 10 per cent of European households now have a digital camera and Lexmark's aim is to "make photo printing easy".

A good start would surely be to print a mark on one side of the paper, advising: 'Print on other side'.

"That's a very good idea; we'd not thought of it," admitted Hamblin when this was suggested to him.

Toshiba is launching a combined hard disk and DVD-Ram video recorder. You use the hard disk for everyday recording and then archive to Ram disc. Fine in theory, yet none of Toshiba's DVD players can play the Ram recordings that the combo recorder archives.

Panasonic has bet the bank on DVD-Ram, calling it a "key strategic product" that is "targeting 50 per cent share". I borrowed a drive and went out to try and buy some blank discs.

Most shops had plenty of DVD-RW and DVD+RW blanks, but no Rams. The Oxford Street branch of Dixons had two dusty three-packs for £35, which makes them £11.66 each - around four times the price of RWs.

After excuses about "the huge success of sales for our DVD-Ram Recorders" Panasonic owned up. "We can understand your point that currently Ram media does appear to be in short supply. We will do all we can to improve this position in the weeks and months ahead," it said.

So why does it need a journalist to tell the largest consumer electronics company in the world that people need to be able to buy blank discs for its recorders?

Perhaps it's for the same reason that both Panasonic and Sony are still launching new digital snapshot cameras that have only an LCD viewfinder.

No-one in those companies can ever have tried to use their own camera on a sunny day, when the LCD image is completely invisible, with the battery rapidly going flat. All it needs is a little optical finder sight and an On/Off switch for the LCD.

This is not rocket science, it's just common sense. Maybe there should be an industry accord on customer service that compels these executives to purchase and use their company's products, and experience the frustration most of us have endured for years.

Who knows, it might even help sell more PCs at a time when the market is flattening.

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