"This program is used rarely"

[James H]

.... which is absolute bollocks. I use Firefox, MSN and Winamp almost daily and it still comes up with "rarely" on the addremove list. What gives? Is there a special way windows predicts how much we use programs? Or is it just an utter pile of steaming wank?

[Nick Harvey]

I'm surprised about MSN in your list.

In my experience, programs from Uncle Bill's organisation seem to get "loaded" in the list, whilst programs from anyone else's little companies seem to show up as "rarely".

[Dr Lobster*]

do you start these from shortcuts on your desktop?

i believe it only counts applications launched from the start menu to calculate usage.

[Nick Harvey]

i believe it only counts applications launched from the start menu to calculate usage.

That sounds like just the sort of logic Uncle Bill would use, doesn't it?

You need to have easy access to programs you use frequently.

So, what do you do? Put a shortcut to them onto your desktop.

He really does need lessons in how to use a computer, that bloke, doesn't he?

[Dr Lobster*]

i believe it only counts applications launched from the start menu to calculate usage.

That sounds like just the sort of logic Uncle Bill would use, doesn't it?

You need to have easy access to programs you use frequently.

So, what do you do? Put a shortcut to them onto your desktop.

He really does need lessons in how to use a computer, that bloke, doesn't he?

it seems somewhat illogical, if only from a design point of view. one assumes the count is trigged by the process of clicking on a shortcut, so it shouldn't matter where it is launched from - i really can't understand why it's done this way. the windows prefetcher optimizes no matter how you start the application, even is it's launched as a child process with the windows createprocess() call. it's odd that this is different.

on a personal note though, i actually don't use the desktop at all, i've disabled it from group policy editor.

my most used programs are on the left panel of the start menu:



what annoys me about the desktop is that you have to minimize all your stuff to launch something, i personally find it easier to have them in the start menu, so i don't need to minimize or shuffle around what i've got on screen.

that said, i think i'm in a minority - whenever somebody needs to do use my pc at work (for instance, when their own has frozen or something), they find my setup impossible to use. what throws them the most is that i have my start bar on autohide.

[all new Phil]

I'm the same, I don't have any icons on my desktop, I don't see any need to. I have Firefox and MSN shortcuts on my taskbar, everything else I go through the Start button!

[Sput]

My desktop is a hideous mess and I just *love* to launch things off it, that's why I use the start key+D to switch between empty and what I was doing.

[Ant]

I have 11 icons going down the left and two at the top right, two at the bottom right. My desktop used to be completely full but it started to annoy me

[cwathen]

That sounds like just the sort of logic Uncle Bill would use, doesn't it?

You need to have easy access to programs you use frequently.

So, what do you do? Put a shortcut to them onto your desktop.

It's actually even more flawed than this. The Windows 3.x Program Manager separated the user from the filesystem. Although file associations did exist so you could double click on a document within File Manager, almost all users would just load the program from Program Manager and then use the program's own file open controls to open whatever file they wanted to use. But 3.x was an oddity. Windows 1.x, 2.x and 95 onwards immersed the user in the filesystem to a much greater extent.

Today, this means that people won't necessarily launch Microsoft Word, then go to File, Open to get a given document, they'll just go to the document file itself and double click on it which will open Word with the document. This is even truer with media players; some of them do not provide any built in way of opening a file, but rely entirely on file assocations so that people just double click on the file they want to play and have it load in the associated program. Presumably, opening programs via file associations also does not factor in Windows' usage statistics, which is bizarre since directly clicking on a file to load the program through file associations must now be the most common way of launching a program if you intend to work with a pre-existing file ((and as I mentioned above, although often attributed to Windows 95, this method of launching programs was actually standard practice in Windows 1.x and 2.x, it was only 3.x which changed it).

[Nick Harvey]

what annoys me about the desktop is that you have to minimize all your stuff to launch something.

I always keep "Show Desktop" next to the Start button to avoid individually minimising everything and so I can produce my desktop from just one click.

I agree with Chris on file associations. My Windows experience started on version 3, so I still tend to open the program first, then open the file, purely because that's the way I originally did it.

Dirty old habits die hard!

[noelfirl]

I always keep "Show Desktop" next to the Start button to avoid individually minimising everything and so I can produce my desktop from just one click.

Same here. I find that when navigating throught the start menu, my mouse (or possibly my shaky hand) dips outside of the specific dropdown menu, making it disappear and me have to navigate to it again. Saying that though I've got the usual plethora of common applications pinned to the main start menu.