Microsoft Quietly Previews PC Advisor Repair Tool 151
notthatwillsmith writes "On Friday, Microsoft invited members of the Windows Feedback Program to try out a preview of a new application, the Microsoft PC Advisor. The new tool promises to 'continuously monitor your PC for problems and give you the solutions to fix them, in real time.' After testing on several Vista machines with a variety of problems, Maximum PC has written a full report on the Microsoft PC Advisor. The short version? Like every other 'PC Repair' tool they've tested, the new apps signal-to-noise ratio is quite bad, and it misses the obvious and important problems, like out-of-date videocard drivers."
I wonder what they were expecting. (Score:4, Insightful)
This tool seems to be made to improve user experience for non technical users and the whole review goes on and on that technical user could already do these things by himself.
Im sure.. (Score:5, Insightful)
That MS would surely get in trouble for this, but MS could very well use a repository, along with MD5 hashes of recommended programs.
They could provide what we Linux users have with Synaptic and dpkg. They could provide "MS Legit Software", "Driver Repository", "3rd party Software", and "GPL and derivatives". There's 6 branches of Windows to do right now (98, ME, 2k, XP, 03 server, Vista), and most of them are rather outdated.
But really, can we really say how bad this tool is by it not catching somewhat out of date drivers? Where exactly can a bot get the filename for the specific driver you need? nVidia, ATI, and Intels websites are rather hard to find drivers IF you screen-scrape.
As I've always been saying: (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have to use a whole bunch of programs that consume a whole chunk of the computer's processing power just so that the computer can function properly, then something is damn wrong with it, on the very basic level.
I mean, wouldn't it be easier to fix the reasons of those common problems if they're so common, than it is to make some bizarre problem-solving applications?
Not exactly. (Score:4, Insightful)
The tool did NOT find the problem that was causing their crashes. Which was that their video drivers were to versions behind.
What the tool DID "find" was mostly meaningless (empty IE's temp folder and such).
Not enough useless software running in the bckgrnd (Score:5, Insightful)
...so it's time to add another. ;-)
The REAL problem is that these tools have a different agenda to the end user. The end user just wants the damn thing to work. The vendor wants to sell them more software, do a security theatre dance around the PC. The geek coding isn't able to step back and work out what the user will and won't understand (and none of these tools have really good help explaining the technical gibberish in plain English). So what these tools invariably do is just throw up technically correct but obscure messages that the user just clicks to get rid of. Half the time if the user does bother to take the suggested action, the outcome is bad because the software was never smart enough to make the decision, and the end user just never understood the problem in the first place.
Re:Oh, come on... (Score:3, Insightful)
No soft is know it all: change the paradigm (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm getting a bit frustrated waiting for the industry to realize they need to make those applications a little more interactive.
For example, from the article, the tool suggested a number of IE fixes when the primary browser used on the system is Firefox. The tool detecting the default browser is easy, but IE may still be used while not being default.
The solution: just damn ask the user, does he use IE despite it's not the default browser. Just make the process more like a dialog, let the user add some input to the process.
When a collection of solutions is formed, don't just spit them to the user, but ask him what problems he has, what apps he uses, and dynamically trim/modify the proposed solutions according to that. It's still faster than waiting for an actual person to show up and fix the problems, and that person would still ask the user a lot of those questions.
Re:Not exactly. (Score:3, Insightful)
(empty IE's temp folder and such)
I prefer to use CCleaner [ccleaner.com] for cleanup like that. My only gripe is that it isn't Open Source.
Re:Im sure.. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's simple. Do it the Debian Way.
Stable, Testing, Unstable.
Drivers in that order.
Stable are the ones that have been tested and vetted and work 99.99999% of the time (6sigma).
Testing drivers are the ones that work rather well, but have occasional problems. Not quite a Work in Progress, but not bug free.
Unstable. Yummy. Kernel Panic warnings and such abound. Ye civilized people not belong here!
Debian has it right, at least in the driver department. Stuff they say works just works.
Re:Pretty useful (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only does Linux know how to deal with fragmented files, it knows how to avoid letting it happen in the first place. Instead of cramming each file into the first open spot on the disk, even it it's just one cluster, Linux tries to find a place on the disk where there's room for the file to grow. That way, until your disk is getting very full, or you've got a lot of files that you're constantly updating and re-writing to different places (e.g., large databases) you'll never have to worry about defragging. Over the years, Microsoft has been very good at taking technology developed elsewhere and making it part of their OS, and they'd be doing their customers a good turn if they re-wrote the algorithm used to decide where on the disk the file goes.
Re:ssdwee oijio0j w3455 xxasdfer23aj oojlkj (Score:3, Insightful)