Barry Fox

Jazz bass player and pianist Red Mitchell used to sing a song he wrote entitled Simple Isn't Easy. It had a catchy tune and clever lyrics. The gist of the song was that it is hard to play music that sounds easy on the ear, and a lot easier to create a barrage of notes that sound clever but are instantly forgettable.

It's the same with computer software. It has been easier for developers to keep hanging more and more new features onto an old creaking structure than it is to create a logical structure that makes it easy for people to do the things they most often want to do.

Instead of responding to years of ridicule by making manuals more coherent, we can now either use Help files that often don't help, spend at least £20 on a book or waste a ream of paper and a complete ink cartridge to print out massive pdf files that will fill a thick ring binder. The outcome is that much of what we now do with a PC is the result of trial, error and happy accident.

Several readers have been grateful that I found out by pure chance how to load any old obsolete Word Pro file into Word without cluttering the screen with garbage from unrecognised control characters. Just select 'Recover text from any file'.

Now all I have to do is find out how to stop Word resetting plain text to font sizes that are too small, despite my preferred default settings. What I want is for Word to ask me a simple question. What font do you want until you click here to change it?

I also know what I want when twiddling thumbs and biting nails while the hard disk light is flashing, the cursor is flickering and typed text takes several seconds before bursting onto screen.

The processor is clearly doing something very clever and demanding in the background, which is slowing everything else to a snail's pace. I suspect Iomega Backup is my personal culprit. But why doesn't it tell me, like Norton does when scanning new text files for virus infection?

Yes, I know that experts can use Control-Alt-Del to get Task Manager on the screen and then click Processes. But the list of programs can easily top 100 and there is no plain English advice on how important they are.

After 20 years of Windows is it really too much to ask for a simple pop-up that tells when the processor is too busy to work properly, what it is doing, whether it is safe to stop it and how to stop or delay it if it is safe?

When error messages with long codes appear on screen, it's obviously useful to copy or print them at the press of a button for relaying to a support line. In the days of Dos, the Print Screen key dumped a complete image of the screen content to paper. Now we need add-on third-party software with a range of confusing options. Right-clicking to copy or print either does nothing or throws up a useless, 'What's this?'

USB was promoted as plug-and-play, hot-swap heaven. So why when I unplug my USB TV tuner and Corex card scanner, how ever briefly, does XP demand the original installation disc? Why can't XP store all necessary installation files during the first installation? People lose or damage discs. That's the way of the real world.

When Windows asks for a named file from a setup disc, why can't it search intelligently through all folders and directories on the disc, instead of reporting 'file not found' until I use Browse to steer Windows to the right location and click to select?

The stock advice for speeding up a PC is to delete unwanted programs. I deleted WinDVD because I do not use it to watch DVDs. My TV tuner stopped working. All it needed was a warning of knock-on effect: 'If you delete this program the following devices and applications may not work properly.'

The information for this kind of warning must all be there in the Windows Registry, if only Windows bothered to use it.

We are also told that a good way to speed up Windows is to delete or uninstall unused fonts. OK. So just give us an option to display fonts that are not being used with the 'Hint' that getting rid of them will safely help performance.

To access patents from the US Patent Office online library you need to install a special flavour tiff reader. Recently, it stopped working. A new version of Quicktime, installed by a movie edit program, had grabbed responsibility for opening all tiff files but could not handle the special flavour tiffs. Intelligent use of the Registry could have popped up a warning or explanation.

Many of these problems would be solved if Windows (and the now absurdly bloated Office) came with a Simple Startup Mode option. Not something as drastic as Safe Mode, which disables disc drives, but a half-way house with the intelligence to learn what programs, features, fonts and settings the user frequently uses, and then load only those features.

Clicking on something not loaded would pop up an option to reactivate. This would lubricate performance and be a troubleshooting boon.

The developers at Microsoft will throw up their hands and say how difficult it would be to implement these. But as Red Mitchell sang, simple isn't easy.

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!