This works for me on so, so many levels.  Read more 

For reasons that need not concern us here—but also involve the massive suckitude of Microsoft’s monopoly—I had to go buy a laptop the other day.  Read more 

Via James Fallows, I found OfficeWatch, and if you’ve installed Vista, and your machine has performance problems worse than Rush Limbaugh, there’s still hope, even if you can’t switch to a real operating system like *nix or its flashy cousin, OS X). The problem is the Vista indexer (“Windows Search”), which doesn’t scale**. But you can disable it:

Do you have trouble with Outlook 2007 and other programs running slowly under Windows Vista? We’ve had more reports of excruciatingly slow running Windows Vista, especially with Outlook 2007, and given that Peter’s main computer has the same problem, we’ve spent some time working on the problem. There’s nothing on the Microsoft web site to help, which figures because to admit a problem of this size would affect sales of both the operating system and Office suite.

What’s particularly hilarious—or tragic, depending on your point of view—is that Vista’s indexing screws up Outlook, so you have to choose between searching your mail and having, like, your machine actually run, instead of crawl, or stagger and fall down. Since, at many corporations, knowledge management is storing years of Outlook mail, this can be a serious problem. Is this the “innovation” we keep hearing about whenever Redmond tries to justify its monopoly?  Read more