business expansion

Submitted by rowcall on Fri, 11/14/2008 - 10:44am

The problem with PC Advisor parallels with that of a real person consultant.  Identify your core clientele base and market it to them.  In doing so, you created a niche market and possibly followers later on.  If the program is designed too dumbed down, the flock will be few and non-unique.  Personally, as a power user and tinker aficionado, the idea of PC Advisor is too much "Big Brother" for me.  Your average Granny doesn't have the patience nor tolerant for pop-up messages.  For her, it is best to create a computer environment with high restrictions so that any potential for calamity is mitigated or at least made dificult.  This is a tough sell and MS might just be padding the bill to keep its developers busy because for Granny, time can't be wasted because mortality is just around the corner.

By the way, I don't appreciate MPC use of sensational article title.  In no way shape or form has MPC article discuss the relevancy of Apple's role in this apps.  What are you smoking? 

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If the instructions are

Submitted by Muerte on Mon, 10/13/2008 - 11:11am

If the instructions are written clear enough, ie, not in tech speak, anyone who can follow instructions can do almost anything short of installing a new motherboard and cpu, they need to with a computer.

For driver updates take a cue from Nvidia.  If its any easier to do don't know how.  And with a little more design in the software even the uninstalling of the old drivers can be automated.  Well its already there all you have to do is execute it.

 BSOD's aare annoying at best.  Find a way to throw and actual error message.  It might be as simple as the last executed instruction was from this program to use this piece/pieces of hardware.  This would at least give someone troubleshooting a place to start. Although you'd probably have to have hardware manufacturers willing to throw error messages when they die also.

 The way this thing works now it just seems like a rewrite of the tutorial.

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The Apple part?

Submitted by SteveSilver on Mon, 10/13/2008 - 5:50am

I'm missing something - the article refers to "Going after Apple next?" but it's not clear to me how that is part of this. Or is that going to be a separate article? (Frankly, I hope Microsoft is not planning on "going after Apple" in any way other than producing better software, particularly on the OS front - we PC users don't need another advertising campaign, just better products.)

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"Your computer is slow because..."

Submitted by _jmk on Mon, 10/13/2008 - 4:32am

I've spent a lot of time troubleshooting friends' Windows boxes, and the #1 question I get asked is "why did my computer slow down?" There are lots of potential reasons -- memory pressure, disk performance, degraded internet connectivity, rogue software, etc. -- so answering the question can take a lot of work.

A killer app would watch for bottlenecks, and provide useful feedback: "Your system is running slowly because Microsoft Outlook and Norton Antivirus are both trying to use your hard drive at the same time. Quitting one of them would speed up your computer."

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drivers

Submitted by strykyr on Mon, 10/13/2008 - 1:09am

Something that monitors driver versions and such.  Another thing...while I haven't seen a single BSOD since I installed ultimate 64bit...when one happens...in common english mind you...why it happened and what to do about it without scouring the internet.  I spent 11 days one time trying to fight BSODs and install xp because of bad memory.  The BSOD concept is absolutely horrible.  Think it mught be time to revamp that and give it useful information instead of memory locations and such.  If you guys can get it to tell you the stuff it does tell you to figure out whats going on, why not just have it tell you whats going on.

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Thanks for your feedback from Microsoft

Submitted by Matthew Kerner ... on Mon, 10/13/2008 - 12:29am

Hello Will,

Thanks for taking the time to write this review of Advisor.  I know that the Advisor team here at Microsoft, and that I personally value these kinds of reviews: they help us focus on what matters to reviewers and to improve those things going forward.

One of the tricky things about working in this space is that there are so many different categories of users.  Many of the power users I've spoken with want more details from tools to help them understand exactly what's happening on their PC.  In contrast, my grandmother routinely reminds me that she feels way out of her depth with anything that doesn't simply work the first time.  For her, the experience offered by Advisor is advanced and perhaps even inscrutable.  It sounds to me like you (and perhaps your readership) are fluent with the tools and help resources built into Windows - in this case things like tutorials and the toolbox are less relevant.

Another major thrust of your feedback was about the PC Checkup content - the list of problems and solutions that we identify.  This is the specific area that my team works on.  I'm glad to see that we found a set of problems that were relevant for your machine - we worry both about underwhelming and overwhelming users with this list.  I also hear that there were some very specific and annoying problems that we didn't identify.  If you'd like, feel free to post the details of those problems and we can research whether they can be added to our list.

In fact, I would encourage both you and your readers to respond with any PC Checkup suggestions you'd like to make.  I'll commit to checking the site over the next few days to see what folks have written, and to raise those problems as candidates here at the office.  I can't promise that we'll develop solutions for them (we may not be able to detect or solve the problem in such a way that most of our users can benefit from the work) but we will consider them seriously.

Thanks again for taking an interest in Advisor and for writing a detailed review.

Best regards,
Matthew Kerner
Microsoft Corporation

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