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Original post by Extrarius
My experience differs - the problem I see most often is too many "utilities" (most of which the user intentionally installed) running in the system tray which significantly increase time from boot to usable system and consumes significant computer resources thus slowing all other operations. The next most common thing I see is malware of some type similarly consuming excessive computer resources, and third is malware corrupting user settings (on purpose or not) in a way that prevents them from being able to (for ex) run executables.
Very good, very true points. MSI should be an update service so that no app has any reason to keep updaters and what have you running in the system tray just to check for updates (jusched.exe, I'm looking squarely at you!).
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Original post by capn_midnight
As for adding better search to windows... I don't know, I don't have a problem finding my files. They're all in one place, and they're organized into folders. If I'm looking for a copy of my resume from 3 years ago, it's in "documents/business/2007". In fact, I've turned the disk indexing service off, and have reaped huge performance gains as a result. The rare times I'm searching for files, it's an obscure system file, so it wouldn't be indexed anyway and I'm desperate enough to wait for a disk scan.
Most people aren't nearly as organized/anal as you are. Even for those of us who are, though (/Users/oluseyi/Documents/Resume/Archive/2007/PDF - or ...Word, ...Text or ...Pages depending on required format [smile]), some of us enjoy the facility of pervasive search. For instance, on OS X, I do not have a single application pinned to my dock. I use Spotlight as a general-purpose launcher, and will also use it to locate documents whose name and/or location I am not as certain of. Nothing precludes search and organization from peaceful coexistence.
ChurchSkiz also makes fantastic points about multi-presence and massive data sets. I, too, have thousands of pictures; I find iPhoto's "Faces" feature to be quite nifty, letting me find pictures based on who's in them. (It analyzes your pictures and uses facial recognition to extract representative images which you simply need to name, so now you can search for all pictures of John or Sally or Femi trivially.) It can also process GPS data that some camera devices geo-tag pictures with, letting you search by location.
As data sets grow, rigid classification becomes more difficult and search becomes much more powerful.
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Original post by geo2004
At what point could it be possible for Microsoft to scratch everything and start from the ground up with a brand new OS?
They can do it at any time now, thanks to virtualization. Modern incarnations of Windows don't literally contain all the code (and bugs) to run older versions of Windows; they just contain built in virtual machines - best seen in Windows Server 2008 R2. They
won't do it any time soon because starting from scratch is an incredibly dumb idea. Code doesn't rust or rot, and new code means new bugs. Why would Microsoft throw away decades of filed-tested code and all the knowledge about real-world usage it represents?
