Microsoft causing lost productivity. A rant.
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Talk about apps freezing... I HATE it when Windows Explorer goes and freezes up whenever there's a network hiccup. Since Windows Explorer also happens to be the main GUI of Windows itself, everything freezes. It's ridiculous. I've lost count of the number of times I felt like smashing something (thank goodness for self control) because of it. It happens multiple times every day. I believe it's been like this ever since Win95 or something. Whenever I open IE I get a "connecting to proxy" message or some junk like that. Fortunately I don't have to deal with IE often (FF fanboy here)
You can correct the Windows explorer freeze on network hiccup - you can tell it to darn well *do not * go checking the network shares all the time - some registry setting somewhere, sorry you'll have to google for the exact setting. A long time ago I did that and makes my life so much better!
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
- IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. Try set the home page as "about:1" or just "about:" this save sometimes ^.^ (may be just 0.1-0.5 second)
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
I think the NRA defence for Microsoft might be applicable. The problem IE has is the content it is increasingly required to display. If you run a minimalist version, every web site is constantly requiring you to flash, pop-up and all manner of other stuff. I used to have the Sydney Morning Herald as my home page but that became too slow with ads, pop-ups pop-overs, videos, slide-shows and who knows what before even a line of real news made it to the screen. IE has remained constant while that site bloated to unusability It is the same with so many other sites. Word has a similar problem. A good 'executive' document must have all manner of headings, index's references, drawings, pictures.... Word is merely the messenger. Visual Studio has its quirks, but I recently have been working on a project using VCL with BDS6. That has reminded me how easy the entry to VS is. Outlook and SQL Management Studio though...you have identified the dinosaurs.
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Yes. If I have Outlook running, and I sleep my portable, it is at lesat 3 minutes before I can really use it again after I wake it up -- especially if I leave it sleeping for several hours. It hits the disk _hard_. Looking at the process manager it is clear it is doing lots of paging. I have no idea why every page needs to be touched, and with 2 Gigs and only outlook running why the kernel decided to swap out so much (actually, I guess that might be the way sleep is designed to work)! Actually, also in IE's case, the long pauses almost always come while the disk churns. I hate it. :-) Cheers, Gordon.
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
I've lost count of the number of hours VS has caused me and my colleagues with broken features such as replacing an updated and version controlled copy of a file with an old version and removing the file from version control. DataGrids which cause the properties tab to stop working, a friend of mine had all of the icons for the controls in the toolbox disappear and then there's the unbelievably long wait while it opens a solution with anything more than just a few files. I would love it if just for once Microsoft stopped pushing the .Net framework forward at a pace most can't keep up with with and instead devoted it's resources to fixing the tools which are suppose to make our lives easier. I don't particularly care about features such as SQLinq when the tools which make the new RAD feature don't work :mad: You know I feel just a little better for getting that off my chest :-D
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I've lost count of the number of hours VS has caused me and my colleagues with broken features such as replacing an updated and version controlled copy of a file with an old version and removing the file from version control. DataGrids which cause the properties tab to stop working, a friend of mine had all of the icons for the controls in the toolbox disappear and then there's the unbelievably long wait while it opens a solution with anything more than just a few files. I would love it if just for once Microsoft stopped pushing the .Net framework forward at a pace most can't keep up with with and instead devoted it's resources to fixing the tools which are suppose to make our lives easier. I don't particularly care about features such as SQLinq when the tools which make the new RAD feature don't work :mad: You know I feel just a little better for getting that off my chest :-D
I particularlaly like the way they 'enhanced' the search facility in the document viewer (aka help file). In VS 2003, searching for 'bloat ware' would search for 'bloat AND ware', which, lets face it, is what you want. But, when they released VS 2005 (and this behaviour is 'by design', don't forget), this now searches for 'bloat OR ware'. Or, to put it another way, every search you do returns 500 useless hits. To add insult to injury, installing VS 2005 even breaks VS 2003 in this regard. Words fail me.
Paul Sanders http://www.alpinesoft.co.uk
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
one of the microsoft bloggers posted that an effort is underway to make a stripped down, fast operating system. That would be nice. Then they would need to go after office. So far VS2008 RTP has been behaving, but I'm not in too deep yet, still looking at the new goodies like LINQ and the SharePoint support. Silverlight 1.1 has me cautiously optimistic.
Len
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
I concur about the Help issue mentioned above. This goes not only for Visual Studio but really ANY Microsoft product, even down to Windows itself (such as using Windows Explorer). Try accidentally hitting F1 while navigating Explorer and then enjoy the minute and a half or more of waiting for 'Help' to show up so you can close it. Why not make some sort of universal "OOPS!" key (maybe put it next to the elusive "Any" key) that means you REALIZE you goofed up and fat-fingered a command you typed or clicked the wrong button or accidentally hit an F key and would cancel it? Surely it can't be that terribly hard, now can it? And while we're ranting about the so-called 'Help', how ridiulous is the standard MS Help you get if you hit F1 just in Windows? Or in any Properties for Hardware, hitting the Troubleshoot... button? You get basically as much help as any standard helpless desk phone call..actually, you get less because it walks you through precisely the easiest steps that you PROBABLY already took, hence why you wanted to troubleshoot it. Then when you FINALLY convince it you're not a n00b and get past the obvious, it just tells you to contact Microsoft for more help. I say it should be just as important as getting better-responsive apps (which I do agree with) to put some resources toward a truly helpful Help!
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
The same can be said for a lot of apps from other companies. Adobe Acrobat takes a long time to load itself, even on a dual-core 3.0GHz PC with SATA discs, just so I can view--not edit, just view--a PDF document. Same for Photoshop, just so I can view or edit an image. And what is Firefox doing when I first open it that it takes 30+ seconds before I can browse the internet? It isn't just MS or their products that are bloated and slow.
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I concur about the Help issue mentioned above. This goes not only for Visual Studio but really ANY Microsoft product, even down to Windows itself (such as using Windows Explorer). Try accidentally hitting F1 while navigating Explorer and then enjoy the minute and a half or more of waiting for 'Help' to show up so you can close it. Why not make some sort of universal "OOPS!" key (maybe put it next to the elusive "Any" key) that means you REALIZE you goofed up and fat-fingered a command you typed or clicked the wrong button or accidentally hit an F key and would cancel it? Surely it can't be that terribly hard, now can it? And while we're ranting about the so-called 'Help', how ridiulous is the standard MS Help you get if you hit F1 just in Windows? Or in any Properties for Hardware, hitting the Troubleshoot... button? You get basically as much help as any standard helpless desk phone call..actually, you get less because it walks you through precisely the easiest steps that you PROBABLY already took, hence why you wanted to troubleshoot it. Then when you FINALLY convince it you're not a n00b and get past the obvious, it just tells you to contact Microsoft for more help. I say it should be just as important as getting better-responsive apps (which I do agree with) to put some resources toward a truly helpful Help!
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AndoTheOptimal wrote:
Why not make some sort of universal "OOPS!" key
But your operation would be finished before the operation could be cancelled and then you would have to wait another minute for the Oops operation to finish!
WarePhreak Programmers are tools to convert caffiene to code.
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You can correct the Windows explorer freeze on network hiccup - you can tell it to darn well *do not * go checking the network shares all the time - some registry setting somewhere, sorry you'll have to google for the exact setting. A long time ago I did that and makes my life so much better!
But I think that's the authors' point... Why should we have to 1) Hope to somehow discover that such a hack exists? 2) Have to go find the hack? 3) Implement the hack on each and every machine we work on?? As I see it, the fact that the hack even exists is MS's admission that they've failed and that their stuff is bloated crap.... Otherwise, why would they even put in a hack like that? And, having put it in, why don't they advertise it... Vista is pathetic in this regard (and far too many other ways...) It has that bloated, resource pig "SearchIndexer" that you can neither turn off nor kill, there's no controls or settings or UI, and working in concert with Windows Explorer etc it's supposed to make navigation easier... Yeah, right, as if... Instead what happens is that even though the SearchIndexer is running continuously in the background, if you happen to "touch" or click the wrong folder in WE (and who can tell, now that the thing is so visually cluttered and busy and poorly laid out), WE **STILL* freezes minutes or even tens of minutes!!!! Doing what??? It's gotten to that point that anymore, anytime I'm navigating and I see the "busy" cursor for more than a few seconds, I go pskill that instance because I know that at least 95% of the time, once WE enters that state it's going to sit there for minutes while doing that, being 100% frozen and chewing up resources like mad. Were that WE were the only such example... Vista itself at times becomes catatonic... VS05 is so buggy on Vista as to be almost unusable... At times on Vista and in response to such heavy-weight tasks as opening a file or switching views/windows, VS05 will start chewing up all available cycles and yet will still go away for minutes or even tens of minutes at a stretch, being completely unresponsive and basically bringing the machine to it's knees.
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Chris, As an MVP, did you not get invited to test drive Office while it was in Alpha/Beta?
"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it." - Ellen Goodman
"To have a respect for ourselves guides our morals; to have deference for others governs our manners." - Laurence Sterne
I've worked at MS off and on and also participated in unofficial (dogfood) and offical alpha/beta processes. The problem is that 1) MS puts up a strong wall, even to internal voices and alpha/beta testers/adopters 2) Of the relative trickle which does get through, even that is heavily filtered before even being seriously looked at 3) Most perf issues are almost always punted to stabilization *after* alpha/beta in the belief that they'll have time to do perf work in that period. To their credit they often DO spend lots of resources on perf in that period, but unfortunately by then features and bulk code changes are locked out and that means that any perf issue that can't be fixed without a lot of code churn or risk will almost always get shipped 4) Most MS Product/Program execs, managers, devs, and higher level test types almost always have the latest and greatest high powered HW and therefore often don't perceive perf issues the same way the market does once the product ships. I watched and listened as untold hundreds of Vista devs (out of only those I was exposed to) scrambled, begged, pleaded, cajoled, and even spent their own money on high-powered machines and especially video cards during Vista, all the while saying that perf wasn't an issue because customers could just go buy the same HW. Yeah, right, like everyone who wants to or has to adopt Vista needs (or will be allowed to) acquire a dual or quad proc machine with a $500+ video card and huge, fast, expensive HDDs.
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Where's Borland when you need them?
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Coming soon: Got a career question? Ask the Attack Chihuahua! www.PracticalUSA.com
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Yes. If I have Outlook running, and I sleep my portable, it is at lesat 3 minutes before I can really use it again after I wake it up -- especially if I leave it sleeping for several hours. It hits the disk _hard_. Looking at the process manager it is clear it is doing lots of paging. I have no idea why every page needs to be touched, and with 2 Gigs and only outlook running why the kernel decided to swap out so much (actually, I guess that might be the way sleep is designed to work)! Actually, also in IE's case, the long pauses almost always come while the disk churns. I hate it. :-) Cheers, Gordon.
"I have no idea why every page needs to be touched" Garbage collection. Is outlook written in .NET? If not, then it still has potential to get worse. http://www.virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=176[^]
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Gee Chris, I really don't see these kinds of problems. IE loads fast for me, and clicking on a new tab is near instantaneous (less than 1 second). Word 2007 loads for me in less than 3 seconds. Excel is even faster. Outlook is fast for me (but then i'm not using exchange these days, I do remember Exchange made Outlook a bit slower). If you press the wrong button, how is that Visual Studio's fault? Would you prefer it pop up a dialog asking "Are you sure you wanted to do that?". Some tasks are simply not going to be instantaneous, and if you hit them by accident, it's your fault really. I agree with you about SQL management studio, but then it's an an app written entirely in .NET that uses a *LOT* of reflection and other dynamic data enumeration that will be slow by nature of what it does. Of course I have a machine with 4GB of memory, but memory is freaking cheap. 2GB costs about $75, and a dual core processor will REALLY make things work a lot better. I guess I just don't see why Microsoft should target their professional products at low-end equipment.
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
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Ah, the halcyon days of VC++ 6.0 :((
Visit http://www.notreadytogiveup.com/[^] and do something special today.
Oh please, what selective memory we have. How many of us were complaining about VC6 when it came out? Inellisense took days to pop up, Help was unusable, major problems with the UI... The deal is that hardware caught up with it. That's the problem with ALL microsoft products, they target them for next years hardware, not last years hardware.
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
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Gee Chris, I really don't see these kinds of problems. IE loads fast for me, and clicking on a new tab is near instantaneous (less than 1 second). Word 2007 loads for me in less than 3 seconds. Excel is even faster. Outlook is fast for me (but then i'm not using exchange these days, I do remember Exchange made Outlook a bit slower). If you press the wrong button, how is that Visual Studio's fault? Would you prefer it pop up a dialog asking "Are you sure you wanted to do that?". Some tasks are simply not going to be instantaneous, and if you hit them by accident, it's your fault really. I agree with you about SQL management studio, but then it's an an app written entirely in .NET that uses a *LOT* of reflection and other dynamic data enumeration that will be slow by nature of what it does. Of course I have a machine with 4GB of memory, but memory is freaking cheap. 2GB costs about $75, and a dual core processor will REALLY make things work a lot better. I guess I just don't see why Microsoft should target their professional products at low-end equipment.
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
If you press the wrong button, how is that Visual Studio's fault?
There are operations that, no matter what, are going to take a long, long time to complete. Hitting F1 accidentally, invoking the refactoring system etc. What would be nice would be a small "Loading..." or "Initialising..." dialog with a big bright "Cancel" button.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Chris Maunder wrote:
IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there.
Chris, Even today morning I thought about the same. Always it's trying to connect something. don't Microsoft know that about:blank is blank webpage eh? or are they seeing any future possibilities of any websites in that name? Just sticking with Safari (sometimes the FLV performance of firefox really sux) and Firefox.
-Sarath. "Great hopes make everything great possible" - Benjamin Franklin
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