I was having the usual computer woes this week and I realised that after over 30 years playing with computers that things have steadily become worse over the years rather than better. While the interfaces have become more aesthetically pleasing they have also become more complex. I did find one simplifying product this week called Enso Launch that I passed along to our own Wanda Sloan for review but in general it keeps getting harder.
I had my Start toolbar vanish for a while today and in the end only a reboot made it come back. I followed the recommendations first like pressing Ctrl-Esc, running explorer.exe from a command line and so on but nothing happened. Sometimes the only way to fix things with Windows is to just reboot, sometimes it takes more than once. Why this happens is one of the great Mysteries of Windows.
Office 2007 is on my new office notebook - it has the nice new ribbon with all sorts of things on it but I have yet to locate a few of my favourite tools. I did discover OneNote 2007 tucked away on the Office 2007 disk and this looks to a very useful tool for a writer so more on that one later. Outlook 2007 however seems to dominate the CPU cycles and outnumbers any other application as far as different services it hooks into. It also takes a while to appear, as do Word and Excel for that matter.
Source –