[RANT] vista (and Dell) - arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Yes it is a rant and normally I don’t let myself succumb on here but much as I love Windows and hate Macs, Vista really is screwed up. It is slow and cannot seem to cope with the simplest of things - why do I need to watch a green bar progress everytime I try and change directories??? Was it really that slow in XP without the green bar - does that green progress bar make everything seem slower, I really do not think so.

I should say though that I have Vista at home and its not that bad there - it is just on this Dell Latitude D630 (and the other 2 in our office). It seems to be driver issues on the laptop or if not that just a poorly built laptop by Dell. That’s a shame as the D630s were great with XP.

What to do except pull your hair out

OK rant over..

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If you are anything like me, you are using Firefox and a multitude of addons. The downside to all this it turns out is that not only does Firefox become a huge memory hog (it is not unusual for Firefox to be using ~400MB of memory) it also becomes very slow.

The one thing I found which speeds up Firefox no end was disabling the Firebug plugin. I use it a lot when editing the layout of this blog but those are only for short bursts at a time so I can easily disable it.

As for the memory usage, well we shall see..

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I am far behind on completing posts lately (I have about 8 near completion) and now hate the back button on my mouse as I just lost a post I completed on push email for gmail using the iphone. I’ll try and remember it and write it up later now.

sighs.

(you would have thought Wordpress could have cached it somewhere)

mutters.

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It is an obvious thing to say: we place differing levels of protection on the various ways of allowing communication. Over recent weeks I have been watching how people protected their various ways of being contacted.

For example:

Borders has been looking to build out its ability to communicate with its customerbase via email. They ask you at the point of purchase for your email address and in exchange they will give you 20% off their next purchase. It has been hugely successful from what I could see just in the shop alone. People were more than willing to hand over their email address - it took 30 seconds tops and Borders had a way to start a conversation with their customers. (Unfortunately they screwed up the start of the conversation by sending me an email which said this voucher doesnt last very long and only applied to certain things - I deleted the email - but that is a post for another time).

Now imagine if they had asked for my address instead? I am not so sure I’d willingly give it out - I would certainly pause before doing so.

What about a telephone number? No way..

How about SMS? Today not a chance. I wonder if this might change in the future..

Overall though, getting a user’s email address strikes me as being the lowest barrier to starting a conversation with a customer.

Another example over at Kiruba. Here they have taken a screenshot of a business card and blurred out just the telephone number, leaving the address visible. Obviously protecting the phone number is much more important. (The business card is actually a wedding invite (!) but you can read more about that here).

The reason for why we protect some types of communication is down to how interruptive the medium is. The more interruptive the medium the less likely you want to give someone the ability to use it.

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I got bored with the old design which happens once in a while.. so I have a new design courtesy of Vladimir Prelovac - obviously with some minor edits by me

There is still a little work to do, the first of which is to figure out why I have started disappearing from Google again - I have obviously done somethign wrong!

Anyhow, most of my readerbase is via RSS which will never see the design so a gentle nudge to those users to come on over and take a look

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