Writelife

Just so you know from the start – I ain’t no computer expert. Where technology is concerned I have awareness, as opposed to knowledge. But this serves me well, I think, because it allows me to perceive many of today’s technological doodads the way many, if not most, consumers will. With bafflement.

I have two computers here – my Mac (a Powerbook G4) which is my primary computer. But much of what I do involves content that appears on the Web so I need to see things in IE, the browser many people still use. (And on the site I work on the data shows the majority of visitors there are using IE.) Things don’t always appear the same from computer to computer, browser to browser. So to make sure people are seeing what you do the way you intend, you need to check it across various platforms, to the degree you can.

All that is leading up to this: on my PC laptop I’ve loaded Office 2007 and now Windows Vista. I needed to get Office on the PC and as for Vista, I decided, “Why not?” I could play around with it and see how it works and an awareness of it might help me in some of the work I do.

While I’ve loaded both, I’ve been too busy to spend a great deal of time using them. Although to say I’ve been too busy isn’t quite true. Loading Vista was a bit like stepping into quicksand in the sense that I sank into a time sucking pit. Part of the time lost was due to my ignorance, part due to Vista, and quite a bit due to preloaded software on my Toshiba laptop that got a bit weird when it came to Vista. (Can you say Norton Anti-Virus?)

Visually, Vista looks nice. But that was kind of a given. And for the most part, to the very limited extent I’ve used my laptop, it seems to function well. But good heavens … The pop up warnings etc. about drivers or program incompatibilities. When most of that was worked out, it really only came down to two that didn’t mesh well with Vista and in both cases I’ve not a clue what I’m supposed to do about them. And no normal consumer would.

So the experience to this point has left me with a great deal of frustration regarding usability – particularly where it comes to documentation. My favourite was the site I went to looking for a Vista upgrade/download to get some software up to speed. (Okay … it was the Norton site to get the Anti-Virus working.) Along the way I got a message saying I should check the cookies and java on my machine to make sure they were working. Of course, no mention of where to look for those things or what to do about enabling/disabling them – just a message saying I should do it. They couldn’t have said, “If you’re using IE, look here and do this,” or, “If you’re using Firefox, look here and do this.” They simply made assumptions about what the user knows.

Yes, it’s pretty easy for me to figure out where to look and what to do but believe me, many, many of the people I know would not have a clue. (Actually, while I know what to do about these things, where to go to do the changes is well beyond me. I was using IE 7 at the time, foolish me, and trying to track things down in Internet Options is like looking for a particular Smith in an unalphabetized New York phone book.)

I finally gave up … maybe on the weekend when I have time I’ll try to figure out how to get this idiotic anti-virus working in Vista. Fortunately, my main computer is an Apple.

And there’s some other program called “Sonic Solutions” that has a driver being blocked. I’ll likely just uninstall the damn thing though I’ve no idea what affect that will have on my laptop since there’s no indication of what the software is used for.

And interestingly, when you go to the Toshiba Canada site there is no reference to Vista that I can see on their home page or support page, though I believe I found some information when I finally started searching. And on their U.S. site (.com) the only reference I saw was for a notebook they were selling for Vista.

Would it not make sense to have a clearly visible link on your home and support page? Something like, “Questions about Vista?” and create some support material to deal with any issues that might come up, common questions that get asked? Or maybe they just enjoy paying support costs and degrading their brand by annoying people.

Overall, Vista has seemed okay to me, though not spectacular. And of the problems you might expect to arise, they are not so much problems with Microsoft as they are problems with other companies and poor support, poor usability, and plain old lack of awareness of how real people really use computers.

Was that a rant? I guess it was, though perhaps a low key one.

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