I had a recent unfavourable run-in with Microsoft Outlook 2003.
A coworker and friend's laptop has been running rather sluggishly for nearly forever. Reinstalls, benchmarks, even a gig of RAM failed to discover the problem or fix it completely. My mom has the same laptop and I never had any experiences with it to lead me to think they were in any way slow. They're quite capable desktop replacements.
It came to light today how often Outlook would "freeze up." Sure enough, it would often consume 100% CPU and slow the machine down to a crawl. Nothing spectacular about his Outlook usage, lots of mail organized in a lot of folders, regular calendar usage and contact management. Searching google revealed other similiar complaints, but no fixes. The only fix seemed to be "Buy Exchange Server." Now, a company with Microsofts resources surely could build a decent POP3 email client, no? I've had more faith in Microsoft lately, but perhaps I've simply been drinking too much ScobleJuice lately. It never occured to me that Outlook could be causing such a general system performance hit, why should it?!?
Archiving old mail made an improvement, but we weren't talking about ridiculous amounts of email. Heavy usage, but no high-traffic mailing list type usage!
To be fair I switched to Outlook from Thunderbird today. (I use IMAP so no sweat to switch and try something different.) A bit of tweaking to make it more comfortable and it's quite usable. I'm also synching with my Treo 600 Smartphone so I use the whole Outlook package. I'll post again with my experiences after another week or two of daily usage.
A post on John Koetsier's blog reminded me of a great quote I read once.
It's from Karl von Clausewitz and runs as follows: "The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan."
I often catch myself dreaming of the perfect plan when I should be executing the good plan. Nothing wrong with perfect but it can't get in the way of getting something good done!
As of the 27th of September, I'm an uncle again! Congratulations to my sister Marian who had a baby girl, "Josephine."
A side effect of my OpenWRT experimentation has been an effective wardriving compaign.
Over 1700 networks shown: Click
It'll bring your browser to its knees, but it's cool, click it!
The coolest thing about OpenWRT is that you end up with a functional computer for $100. Of course it's not a very fast one with huge amounts of storage or anything, but it's perfect for tinkering with.
Running Linux, it's provides you with a full-featured OS, about 2MB of storage, 16MB of RAM, wireless networking, several network interfaces (you can in fact effectively use each of the 6 network ports as a seperate interface) and about 200 BogoMips of blistering performance.
People have customized these routers in a million different ways. From serial ports to SD cards to LCD screens, the possibilties are endless....