In this interview, from Channel 9, April Reagan (a Program Manager at Microsoft) talks about the up-coming Microsoft Help 3. This client-side help system will be used first in the MSDN Library within Visual Studio 2010, but will be made available for other software companies to use.

Note: I found the first half of the video the most interesting. After that the interview moves onto other things and only returns to help towards the end. Unfortunately there’s not a whole lot of detail about how the new help system will differ from good old HTML Help. There’s no demo, for instance. Still it’s interesting that Microsoft are still investing in the idea of client-side help.

Note: This video belongs to Dan Fernandez and Channel 9.
If you're having problems viewing the above video, try the orignal video on Channel 9,
or view it in Windows Media Player.

Disk defragmenter in Vista no longer gives you the graphical representation of a fragmented disk gradually becoming less and less fragmented. It doesn't even tell you how fragmented your disks are. Instead all you get is a message telling you that the disk is being fragmented and "This may take from a few minutes to a few hours."

This is annoying, because you have no idea where in that vague time range your defragmentation job will fall. Can you kick it off when you go for lunch and expect it to be complete by the time you get back? Or is it an overnight job? However, it's better than so many other progress messages that attempt to tell you how long you need to wait, but inevitably lie to you. For example, I've been having problems with Outlook recently. I had to kill and restart it twice today. The second time it came back it had the familiar message "The data file 'Personal Folders' was not closed properly" and a progress bar with a “seconds remaining” count.

Microsoft seconds obviously don’t work like normal seconds because after waiting for the count to work its way slowly down to "20 Seconds Remaining" I had to sit there for at least 30 seconds before it changed to 25 Seconds, then 30, then 35, then 40, then 45, then 50. From "50 seconds remaining" it took 2 mins 10 seconds before it finally finished and Outlook came to life.

If you don't know how long something's going to take, don't just make something up. And don't mislead the user into expecting something to take less time than it really will. The principle should be that software should not lie.

And don’t believe the Microsoft hype that disk defragmentation is now automated in Vista, so you don’t need to think about it any more. In fact, the Disk Defragmenter’s scheduler is set, by default, to kick off at 1.00 am every Wednesday morning. That’s fine if you leave your computer switched on every night. But if you never leave your computer on on a Tuesday night, it’ll never get defragged.

Personally, I liked the old Disk Defragmenter, with its coloured bands.

I was late leaving work this evening and I was rushing to close down my applications so that I could shut down my laptop. I closed a Word document and immediately pulled the cable to my second monitor. The following error message popped up:

This isn’t a Photoshop job, it’s a real error message, presumably tucked away in some remote corner of Microsoft Word.

Update:

Turns out it's nothing to do with Word (more's the pity). It's a "feature" of Notepad++, which is my text editor of choice right now. I must have been closing down Notepad++ at the same time as Word.

I was tagging an MP3 file and I noticed that the tag changes didn't show up in Windows Media Player 11. The rule seems to be that if you play an MP3 in Windows Media Player, WMP reads the tags first time, stores them in its database and from then on, if you open that same file (same file name in same directory) then WMP gets the metadata from its local database, rather than reading them off the file.

So you can force the new tags to show up by either changing the name of the file, or moving the file to a new location, but as soon as you change its name back to what it was, or move it back to the directory where it was the first time you played it, the original tags will show up again in WMP's list pane.

I thought clearing the cache would sort this problem, but if you go to Tools > Options > Privacy and click Clear Caches, the old tags still show up.

The solution is fairly drastic. You've got to blow away the existing database. The effect is that from that point on WMP starts reindexing all your media as you play it - filling up its database again. Note: you don't lose your playlists - these are stored elsewhere.

Here's what to do:

1. In Windows Explorer, go to the following directory:

   On XP:
   C:\Documents and Settings\$USER$\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player\
   
   On Vista:
   C:\Users\$USER$\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player

2. Delete any files you find named CurrentDatabase_*.wmdb and LocalMLS_*.wmdb.

   If you can't delete the files, make sure Media Player isn't running. You may need to use Task Manager to kill off any Media Player processes that are running. For example:

   wmpnxcfg.exe
   wmpnetwk.exe (you have to list processes by other users to see this)

The BBC iPlayer is a great bit of technology, but it's also a peer-to-peer file sharing client and sometimes you don't want lots of data being uploaded from your computer when you're trying to use that bandwidth for something else.

I've just added an article (my first since revamping this site) that describes how to take control of the iPlayer's KService Windows service and the iPlayer program itself: khost.exe.

Read the article: Preventing BBC iPlayer running all the time