Archive for the ‘Usability (Real World)’ Category

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Reinstalling Windows XP Professional SP3: Operation PC Forgiveness 2008

Saturday, November 8th, 2008

Screenshot of Windows XP

This week I’ve been enjoying a holiday at home with Jane: a chance to enjoy peace and quiet together for the last time before the children arrive, and to reinstall Windows XP on my main desktop PC. That’s been the main reason for my lack of recent blogging, and not laziness — oh no! Not that. No way!

Slowdown to upgrade

It’s a common problem with Windows: it gradually slows down over time. I install and uninstall all sorts of software on it, I use it every day for everything from checking emails to coding, photo editing to video creation. I’m not surprised it slows down over time.

But this time it was getting really bad. At times it wouldn’t boot properly (hardware driver conflicts I think). There was a serious issue with my sound card: if I played a Flash movie (e.g. YouTube) while listening to an MP3, for example, it would send my audio player crazy when I closed the browser window, playing any non-Flash audio two or three times too fast. It made everything sound like the Chipmunks had formed a metal band!

I also wanted to upgrade a couple of major pieces of software:

as well as various hardware drivers:

It was clearly time for Operation PC Forgiveness 2008.

Backup

On Monday and Tuesday I backed up everything. I used Second Copy 7.1 to copy the contents of each partition one-by-one to my external harddrive (Freecom 500GB).

I’ve tried various other applications over the years that take either images of the partition, or backup to a proprietary format, or first compress the files before storing them in a zip file, but in the end I’ve returned to a simple 1:1 copy on an external drive. That way I can access these files at any time from any PC without having to first install any 3rd party applications.

Second Copy

Second Copy allows you to create backup profiles that can be run either individually or within groups. So I have groups for:

  • Applications (e.g. Microsoft Money files, Microsoft OneNote data, WeBuilder settings, Windows Boot.ini file, Second Copy profiles, etc.
  • Outlook PST files, backups and stuff
  • WeBuilder reinstallation
  • Ultimate Backup to external hard drive

There are a few backups that I do manually, for example Firefox bookmarks and anything else that needs to be exported.

Screenshot of Second Copy

This way I can make sure that all my personalized settings have been backed-up before I run the “Ultimate” backup group profiles and copy it all to my external drive.

A couple of things that I always do when doing a reinstallation are:

  • Install and take a print out of all my installed applications using Installed Program Printer.
  • Take a screenshot of desktop (for location of icons).
  • Take a screenshot of Start Menu (for labels and icons).
  • Take a screenshot of the Firefox add-ons that I have installed.
  • Backup Programs folders within Start menu (both All Users and my username profiles). This way I can see how I organized my Start menu.

Reinstall Windows XP

With the backup complete it was time to bite the bullet and reformat my C drive. I have 12 partitions on my hard drives so wiping C simply takes out Windows and programs, all my data, images, videos, music, etc. are safely stored on the other partitions (and now also backed-up).

One thing that I forgot to do before I set the Windows XP installation CD loose on C: was to deauthorize iTunes. D’oh!

Essentials for a Windows XP reinstall:

  • Windows XP with SP3 and IE7 slipstreamed into it.
  • Latest hardware drivers, already downloaded and saved to another partition, external drive or CD-ROM.
  • TweakGuides Tweaking Companion for XP to follow advice on best order to install drivers, and various system tweaks to improve performance.
  • Notebook and pen (to write down everything you do, error messages, settings, passwords, etc.).
  • Laptop (or other PC) for looking up advice, error messages, etc. on the Web.

Reinstalling XP and hardware drivers took a couple of hours. Reinstalling the rest of my software took the best part of a day and a half. I have almost all my applications stored on another partition (I:\) and categorized which makes it very efficient to reinstall:

Screenshot of Install partition

Reorganize All Programs within the Start menu

Once I’ve installed the bulk of my applications, run Windows (or Microsoft) Update a couple of times to make sure that Windows and Office are up-to-date, and done a cursory defrag I always reorganize the Start menu.

This is how the All Programs part of my Start menu looked after I’d installed most of the applications that I use regularly:

Start menu with three columns of programs

That’s three columns with around 85 entries. Even though I’ve done a “sort by name” on the list it’s still a mess! What it needs is some categorization to group similar applications together.

All users

I generally start with the “All Users” folder (right-click START and select “Explore All Users”). I then create a number of new top-level folders to act as my main categories. These are generally the folders that I begin with:

  • Accessories
  • Bible
  • CDRW
  • Fonts
  • Games
  • Graphics
  • Internet
  • Labels
  • Mindmaps
  • Money
  • Multimedia
  • Office
  • PDF
  • Printers
  • Programming
  • Scanner
  • Startup
  • System
  • Windows Mobile
  • WinZip

All Users Start Menu Programs

As it happens, these are also the main category labels that I use on my Install partition (I:\). Keeping a one-to-one relationship between the start menu and the install partition makes it really easy to find installers should I need to perform an upgrade or reinstall.

Having a limited taxonomy makes it really easy to find any application that I have installed: all my graphics applications can be found under Graphics, office applications under Office, etc. It sounds obvious but I’ve seen too many users wasting precious time hunting through an unordered list of 60+ applications.

Sort the rest

Having created these new folders, I then move the remaining installation folders and icons into them before performing the rest of the clean-up on the Start menu itself, creating any sub-folders as necessary. For example, within Internet I always create:

  • Browsers
  • Email
  • Firewall
  • FTP
  • Instant Messenger
  • RSS
  • Server
  • Twitter
  • VoIP
  • Web Building

I prefer to use generic terms such as “Instant Messenger” and “Firewall” than “Windows Live Messenger” and “ZoneLabs ZoneAlarm Pro” as I find it easier to find them this way, it also doesn’t lock me into a particular application as I can use the same folder structure regardless of the applications that I have installed.

I also use this arrangement on my PC at work and on my laptop so it allows me to have different applications installed but use the same organizational structure.

Start menu lite

While it usually takes me about 30-45 minutes to sort out my Start menu at the start it must save me hours each month when looking for applications.

My new, slimmed down start menu then looks a bit like this:

Start menu

Now I have a clean installation of XP, with (almost) all my software installed and I can find things on my Start menu. Now I can get on and do something productive!

Posted in Computer, Design, General, Information Architecture, Productivity, Reviews, Software, Usability (Real World), Windows | 2 Comments »

Why is Low higher than High?

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

Low, Normal, High

Not sure why I’ve never noticed this before. When assigning a priority to a Task within Microsoft Outlook 2003 you can click on the priority box and select from a fly-out context-menu one of three options: Low, Normal or High.

But why didn’t the developers adopt a kind of natural mapping approach to the location of these three options?

In other words why not place High at the top (because it’s higher), and Low at the bottom (because it’s lower)?

Like this:

High, Normal, Low

The only reason I can think of is that they presumed that users would select Low more often than High and therefore made the Low option closer to the drop-down button, so users would have a shorter distance for their mouse to travel when selecting that option.

I never use Low, I use Normal most of the time and then occasionally highlight particularly important tasks with High. The current layout confuses me every time I use it.

Posted in Computer, Design, General, Reviews, Software, Usability (Real World) | 3 Comments »

Greener electronics

Sunday, July 29th, 2007

Guide to greener electronics

I knew there was a reason that I liked Nokia and Lenovo so much: they’re greener than almost every other big-name electronics firms out there. But they still have a way to go.

I picked up this story back in April on the PC Pro website: Lenovo out in front in green race. It’s sat in my “to blog” folder ever since.

How green is your gadget?

It was referring to an electronics guide from Greenpeace where they assigned points (out of ten) to the major mobile and PC manufacturers based on their global policies and practices on eliminating harmful chemicals and on taking responsibility for their products once they are discarded by consumers.

In August 2006 Lenovo were sitting at the bottom of the league in a very sorry 14th place (of 14). Within seven months however, the Chinese company who bought out the PC-manufacturing arm of IBM, had managed to completely turn around their green credentials and were leading with 8/10.

From December 2006 to March 2007 the advertisers’ favourite Apple were bottom of the league on only 3/10. By June 2007 the situation was a little different: Apple had moved to a little over 5/10, making Sony the worst — having not moved at 4/10. While Lenovo had slid to about 7.5, with Nokia overtaking at 8/10.

Top 14

The standings as of June 2007 sit at:

  1. Nokia (8)
  2. Dell (7.3)
  3. Lenovo (7.3)
  4. Sony Ericsson (7)
  5. Samsung (6.7)
  6. Motorola (6.7)
  7. Toshiba (6)
  8. Fujitsu-Siemens (6)
  9. Acer (5.7)
  10. Apple (5.3)
  11. HP (5.3)
  12. Panasonic (5)
  13. LGE (4.3)
  14. Sony (4)

Something certainly to bear in mind when choosing a new PC, laptop, mobile phone or other shiny gadget.

You can read Greenpeace’s Guide to Green Electronics online.

Posted in Climate Change, Computer, Design, General, Usability (Real World) | No Comments »

My new conceptual model of FeedDemon

Sunday, July 29th, 2007

FeedDemon

Last night my conceptual model of how my favourite RSS reader, FeedDemon, works when synchronizing with NewsGator online changed.

Conceptual models

In Donald A. Norman’s book The Design of Everyday Things he writes about the importance of conceptual models:

A good conceptual model allows us to predict the effects of our actions. Without a good model we operate by rote, blindly; we do operations as we were told to do them; we can’t fully appreciate why, what effects to expect, or what to do it things go wrong.

As long as things work properly, we can manage. When things go wrong, however, or when we come upon a novel situation, then we need a deeper understanding, a good model.

(Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, pp.13-14)

So a conceptual model is just the picture we have in our heads about how we think something works.

FeedDemon RSS reader

My RSS reader of choice for the last few years has been FeedDemon, now at version 2.5.

One of the newest features that FeedDemon offers is the ability to synchronize feeds with NewsGator, an online RSS application. This is really useful if you frequently work from more than one PC (e.g. home, work and laptop) as you can add/edit/delete your feeds in one place, and see the changes reflected in your other locations.

The problem I had

So last night I wrote a long blog post about Aunt Mary’s funeral. I published it to my server, and then checked it in FeedDemon. (I do that sometimes just to make sure that my RSS feed is behaving.)

Nothing. No new posts since Friday. Hmm … so I did a refresh. No new posts. So I went online and checked it on NewsGator itself. Again, nothing.

My good friend Solo Bass Steve was online, so he checked his RSS reader … it was fine: the latest post had published out. The problem I reckoned was then with my copy of FeedDemon.

So I tried the following (this is like a blog montage to save time!):

  1. Installed RSS Bandit and checked the feed there — it was fine
  2. Booted up my laptop and tried FeedDemon there — same problem: only old posts
  3. Deleted the RSS cache in FeedDemon, rebooted, resynchronized — didn’t fix things
  4. Uninstalled FeedDemon, resynchronized — no joy!
  5. Removed my blogs folder from synchronizing with NewsGator – refreshed the feeds: BINGO!
  6. At the same time I checked it on my laptop (which was still synchronized) and the new posts suddenly appeared. I checked the clock and it had just passed the hour.

Things were becoming a little clearer.

What I thought happened

My conceptual model of how FeedDemon works in synchronize-with-NewsGator mode was this: I thought that FeedDemon simply sent NewsGator a list of all the feeds that I’m subscribed to and then downloaded the various posts itself.

I regarded the online version as essentially a master list of all my subscribed RSS feeds, which I could access from the three PCs I regularly work from.

I thought that when I started FeedDemon it check its own list of feeds against those on the master list, update the list as appropriate and then allow FeedDemon to visit each of my 100+ subscribed-to websites and download the latest posts.

That’s what FeedDemon does in standalone mode: it downloads the feeds as-and-when, either on a predetermined schedule or manually when prompted.

As a diagram it might look something like this:

Diagram of PC connecting to various servers

My PC is in the middle, synchronizing the list of feeds with NewsGator on the left, and then on the right pulling in the feeds from my subscribed sites.

What I now think what happens

But based on my tinkerings last night it would appear that not only does FeedDemon simply synchronize the list with NewsGator it also pulls in the latest feeds from there too.

It would appear that NewsGator only updates its feeds at a predetermined interval (e.g. once each hour) — which is fair enough for a shared, online service — and it is based on that last automated check which posts FeedDemon actually pulls in, using NewsGator as a proxy.

So, for example, if NewsGator checks for new posts at 10:00 pm, and someone publishes a new blog post at 10:05 pm NewsGator will not pull that in until after 11:00 pm.

In diagram form it might look like this:

PC synchronizing with servers

My PC on the left connects to NewsGator’s server and pulls in the posts that it has already downloaded on its last scheduled check.

That would explain why updating the feed to my blog didn’t pull in the latest posts: all I was asking FeedDemon to do was to reconnect with NewsGator’s servers and check whether it had pulled in anything new. I wasn’t actually checking that feed itself.

Conclusion

For the most part, unless it’s a frequently-changing website (such as BBC News) I guess most folks won’t need an RSS feed reader that checks any more often than once every hour. So in that sense I can understand why the synchronization-mode has been setup like that

It also saves the NewsGator server having to work unnecessarily hard pulling in data that is only going to be accessed intermittently. That’s the compromise that has to be made, I guess, in offering an online synchronized service like this: you can have synchronized feeds but at the cost of them being at most 59 minutes out of date.

However, there seems to be no way to either manually update NewsGator’s list (by logging into your account and requesting a manual update) or change how often it checks for new posts.

I just wish that this had all been made clear: when you change from the standalone mode to synchronized mode you’re now accessing your feeds via the NewsGator proxy rather than the live feeds themselves.

(Diagrams produced in Microsoft Visio 2003.)

Posted in Computer, Design, General, Reviews, Software, Usability (Real World), Web | 3 Comments »

O2 Xda Orbit … nearly a review

Monday, May 28th, 2007

O2 XDA Orbit - it's a PDA, a phone, a GPS, a Radio ... everything!

It was my intention this evening to write a review of my O2 Xda Orbit, the mobile/cell phone / PDA / GPS / radio device that I got about a month ago.

But instead I’m spending my evening performing a hard reset and reinstalling everything, for the second time this month. And I’m not even going to say how many times I’ve had to perform a soft reset. A day.

That, I guess, is a review in itself.

Posted in Computer, General, Reviews, Software, Telephone, Trouble-shooting, Usability (Real World), Xda Orbit | 9 Comments »

Error’d: Psion synchronization dialog

Thursday, May 24th, 2007

Ah, yes. Here’s my favourite user-unfriendly Windows dialog.

This is what you get when you try to synchronize Microsoft Outlook with a Psion 5mx using Psion’s very own PsiWin 2.3.3 and have deleted quite a few of the entries before synchronization:

Synchronizer dialog box

For those of you who can’t read tiny, compressed images of text, it says:

Synchronizer

The Synchronizer has detected 63 missing or deleted items in the Psion. Do you wish to continue and delete the corresponding items?

Click No to retain the items on the other machine.

Click Yes to delete the items on the other machine.

Click Cancel to stop synchronization.

Note: If you have deleted the same item on both machines, it cannot be replaced.

There are a number of reasons that I consider this a terrible dialog box:

  1. Don’t make me think!

    I cannot tell at a glance what I’m supposed to do, without having to read all the text and then work out what on earth it all means. In other words, it’s not intuitive.

    (Following Mike’s comment) What I want is a dialog that I can look at and immediately understand what is being asked of me. I can then spend my time valuably deciding on whether I want to keep that potentially-important data or not. Rather than spending valuable time simply trying to comprehend the text on the dialog box!

  2. Too much text

    Closely related to the previous point: there is too much text. Images would have really helped here; images with the number of missing/deleted items beneath it, perhaps?

  3. Badly labelled buttons

    The text tells me to “Click No to retain the items”, “Click Yes to delete” or “Click Cancel to stop the synchronization”. Why not just label the buttons: Keep items, Delete items, and Stop?

  4. Which machine?!

    The first instruction in the dialog says “Click No to retain the items on the other machine”.

    Which machine?!

    Every time I encounter this dialog I have to stop and work it out, and it always takes me ages: okay, so there are 63 items missing or deleted on the Psion, so the “other machine” must be the PC … right? … right??! So do I want them also to be deleted on the PC? Why could they not just have said: “Click No to keep the items on the PC”?

Confirmation

Once you get past that dialog and decide that yes, you do indeed want to delete the items permanently on both PC and Psion you’re then given the option to back out:

Psion confirmation dialog 2

Confirmation

About to permanently remove items from both PC and Psion.

Are you sure?

The options now, at least, are a more intuitive yes or no. It’s just a shame that you have to practically melt your brain answering the previous question to get there!

Sadly PsiWin is no longer in development — version 2.3.3 (build 149) came out in 2001, and still works with Windows XP, and up-to-and-including Office 2007 — so there is no opportunity to campaign to improve these dialog boxes.

Unless someone is handy with a hex editor … anyone?

Update

Following Mike’s helpful comment below, which made me explain myself a little better I’ve mocked up the following dialogs using Microsoft Visio:

Mock-up of Psion sync dialog box

I have created two here, which (I hope) makes it clear which machines are being referred to and what to do. At a quick glance I can tell on which machine the data is missing or deleted and on which machine’s data I’m being asked to decide. The buttons are also better labelled.

(Error’d entries on this blog are named after the popular Worse Than Failure feature.)

Posted in Computer, Error'd, General, Psion, Usability (Real World) | 2 Comments »

Error message of the week

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

An interface has too many methods to fire events from

The other day I transferred a short five minutes video clip from my DV camera. The bundled software saved it to MPG format, which I then tried to import into the Windows Movie Maker application that comes installed as standard on Windows XP.

Only it wouldn’t have a bar (frame?) of it, instead presenting me with this incredibly user-friendly (that was irony!) warning:

An interface has too many methods to fire events from.

What?! What on earth does that mean?!! How on earth are non-über-geeks supposed to know what to do when presented with that sort of nonsense error message? Poor show Microsoft!

What I did was install my copy of PureMotion EditStudio 1.5 and imported and edited my video clip in that instead. In EditStudio your interface can use as many methods to fire events from as it pleases … I presume.

Posted in Computer, General, Software, Usability (Real World) | 3 Comments »

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