Stories by: Lincoln Spector

Has a surgeon ever told you that, although they're an expert and will do the best they can, the operation still has some inherent risks? Imagine replacing the surgeon with some cheap or free software.

There's nothing to calculating how many watts your PC will need to operate properly. You total up the power needs of your processor, your motherboard, your video and sound cards, and everything else that goes inside your computer, round up to the capacity of a decently-priced power supply, and there you have it. Of course, you have to know the power needs of your processor, your motherboard, your video and sound cards, and everything else that goes inside your computer, but what's life without its challenges.

Make your programs behave themselves.

If a program can output a delimited text file (I'll get to what that means in a minute), Excel can turn it into a reasonable table.

Microsoft tried to make the simple task of addressing a message easier in Windows Mail. They succeeded in making it less intuitive.

Virtually all commercially-sold PCs come with some sort of recovery tool--an alternate way to boot your system (either a CD, a DVD, or a special key combination to press shortly after turning on your PC) that can return your hard drive to its factory condition. Thus, with just a few keystrokes, you can once again have a working copy of Windows, along with all the bundled junk you studiously removed, and none of your own files.

If you click Start, type cookies, and press ENTER, Vista tries to do what XP did: Take you to your Cookies folder, located at C:\Users\your logon\cookies. Except that the Cookies folder isn't there. What is there is a pointer that tells Vista where the real cookies folder can be found. Since Vista doesn't believe you should be privy to this information, it tells you it's not accessible.

Thanks to Windows' built-in support for .zip files, you haven't had to own WinZip or a similar program to compress and decompress .zip archives for quite a while now. The reasons for buying WinZip (or using the free trial version) now is to do things that Windows' .zip support can't handle, such as zip-to-mail, true encryption, and automated backup.

Just ask anyone who's seen Spiderman 3: good ideas seldom survive bad execution.

Without an administrator-level account you can log onto, you can't install new software, edit the registry, or really maintain the PC in decent condition. Windows won't just tell you someone else's password, or let you change it to something you know, but there are ways.

Vista, thy name is bloat!