Posted 10/13/2008 at 03:29:55am

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