But it won’t help.

Microsoft says Windows 7 is netbook-friendly (and it might well be), but that’s irrelevant. The issue is higher margins. If Microsoft prices Windows 7 like Vista, it’s going to raise the total price of netbooks. That is unacceptable. After all, the USP of the netbook is Cheap.

Now, I think the company’s realized the underlying problem: Mobile and Desktop are moving towards each other.

The company is more likely to make higher margins on its Mobile Operating System than on its Desktop Operating System. High-priced smartphones are becoming increasingly popular and also more sophisticated. On the other hand, PCs are getting smaller and lighter – and cheaper.

Most commentators have already identified Mobile and the Cloud as the defining markets for the immediate future and they’re probably right. Microsoft has plays (albeit relatively weak ones) in both these in the form of Windows Mobile and Windows Live.

I think we’re going to see a shift in investment toward these two markets, and away from the PC market. At the minimum, expect a quick rollout of Office Live soon (either free or monetized) and Windows Mobile 6.5.

Everyone complains about how slow their Windows computer or laptop gets. You do too. Here are some simple changes you can make to dramatically improve things.

Note: While there are a hundred ways you can squeeze more juice out of Windows by changing settings in the System Registry, that is beyond the scope of this article. These tips will probably account for 80% of the performance improvement you can possibly get; the registry tweaks will get you the final 20%.

Free up disk space

Turn off System Restore
System Restore creates a “snapshot” of your computer every time you make changes to the system (install programs, update device drivers, more). Should things go wrong, you can “roll back” the system to the last-known good configuration. This is great in theory, but you’ll probably never use it. Just don’t go about installing random applications, and you can safely turn it off and reclaim disk space.

On Windows XP, System Restore is located in Control Panel -> System -> System Restore. Select the “Turn off System Restore on all drives” option. On Windows Vista, navigate to Control Panel -> System. Click on “Advanced System Settings” and then on the “System Protection” tab. See screenshot:

Turn off Disk Indexing

Windows creates a database of all your files so you can do fast file searches. My advice is to leave search to a good desktop search application like Google Desktop. So turn off disk indexing.

Open My Computer, right-click on your Hard Drive icon (C: or D:) and choose “Properties”. At the bottom of the dialog box that opens, uncheck “Index this drive for faster searching”. and click on “OK”. In the dialog box that opens, select “Apply changes to drive C:\, sub-folders and files”, and click on “OK”. See screenshot:

Delete hidden monsters with WinDirStat
Use WinDirStat to clean up files that are occupying space on your drive but are hidden deep in sub-sub directories. Manually searching for all these files is practically impossible.

WinDirStat displays a “Tree-map” view of your entire filesystem. Each file is a colored rectangle. Larger files are larger rectangles. All files in a directory are again arranged as a single rectangle. So the directory rectangle size is proportional to the size of that sub-tree.

For instance, here’s a view of my C: drive:

I can see that there’s a large file in the bottom right-hand side of the tree-map. It happens to be a file in the “MSOCache” folder. Running a quick check on the Internet for “MSOCache” reveals that it contains installation files for Microsoft Office, which can be safely deleted if you have the installation DVD. Deleting the MSOCache folder will free up 550MB on my hard drive – and I hadn’t known that it even existed.

Of course, as always, beware of what you delete.

CrapCleaner
Automatically cleans up your reycle bin, web browser caches, temporary files that have accumulated in your system for months, and lots of other lint that occupies needless space. On typically sluggish computers, I have cleaned up over 1GB of this sort of trash. See screenshot:

Now for the standard stuff, which everyone all too often forgets:

Uninstall Programs from Control Panel
In the Control Panel, under “Add/Remove Programs” (XP) or “Programs and Features” (Vista) look for:

• Multiple music and video players, browsers, chat clients, photo editing software
• Trial versions of programs
• Games you don’t play anymore
• Multiple toolbars for browsers: Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Real, StumbleUpon, and countless others

and get rid of them all. While uninstalling,

• Select the “Complete uninstall” option if there is one.
• Select the “Delete personal data and settings” option if there is one.

Keep only a minimal set of applications that you use regularly. Once you’re done, navigate to the Program Files folder under C: and remove the folder for the application you uninstalled – Uninstalling often doesn’t automatically remove this folder.

Uninstall Microsoft Office components
If you don’t use Microsoft Office applications like Project, Access, Visio but still have them installed, get rid of them.

• From the “Add/Remove Programs” (XP) or “Programs and Features” (Vista), look for “Microsoft Office”
• Click on the “Change” button against the entry for Office
• In the subsequent dialog box, select “Add or remove features”, and deselect the components you don’t need

Don’t install language files
If you run Windows in English, there’s usually no need to install support for additional languages. Whenever you install an application, always make sure you choose “Custom Install”, and deselect the “Support for additional languages” option. For instance, here’s the ‘Custom Install” dialog box during the WinDirStat installation:

Speed up Computer

Defragment your Hard Drives

The oldest and least followed trick in the book. Windows can locate and access files faster on a defragmented disk. This means a noticeable difference in performance, for no cost at all. Run Disk Defragmenter once every couple of months. Set up your laptop defrag to run during lunchtime, or your desktop overnight. Disk Defragmenter is located under Start Menu -> Accessories -> System Tools.

On Windows XP, you can choose which drive to defragment, and there’s a graphical bar that shows before and after defragmentation views of the drives on your disk. On Windows Vista, Disk Defragmenter is rather opaque, with just a “Defragment Now” and a “Modify Schedule” button. See screenshot:

Stop Applications from loading during startup
Having too many applications start automatically when you turn on your computer slows down your startup time, hogs system memory and slows down overall performance. Keep only the ones you need.

• Under Windows XP, go to Start -> Run and type “msconfig” in the box that pops up
• Under Windows Vista, go to Start and type “msconfig” in the search box at the bottom
• Choose “Selective Startup” in the System Configuration box
• On the Startup tab, deselect the applications you don’t want automatically started when you switch on your computer. You’ll be surprised at how many there are.

Use Lite applications

• Use Foxit Reader in place of Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Winamp Classic in place of Winamp Modern
• OpenOffice 2.4 in place of Office 2003/2007
• VLC Media Player in place of Windows Media Player
• CDBurnerXP or IMGBurn in place of Nero Burning ROM
• Windows XP in place of Windows Vista

Store your documents on a separate drive
The “My Documents” folder is usually on the same C: drive as the rest of the Operating System. This means more frequent fragmentation of your drive, leave less space for your system’s paging file and reduced performance. Moving your personal documents to another D: drive will both improve performance marginally and protect your documents should you need to install Windows on C: drive again.

With these simple tips, you avoid doing anything dramatic to harm your computer, and also get surprising gains in free disk space and in performance. Think of it simply as keeping your computer in shape. You owe your machine that.

When OM asked Dan’l why Vista was “everybody’s favorite whipping boy” and “what happened”, Lewin’s reply was that “the blogophere happened”.

Which is probably hitting the nail on the head. In 2007, everyone who had an issue with just about anything with Vista could blog about it – and the blogosphere would take it up and amplify it, via Digg or del.icio.us, among others. As is human nature, far fewer people blogged about things that they had liked about Vista. As a result, the perception of Vista quickly became that of a buggy, bloated animal.

Things were very very different back in 2001 when XP was released. There were far fewer blogs and viewers. Technology websites (the only ones who did any sort of rational evaluation of Vista) got far more readers as a percentage of Internet content than in 2007.

Similarly, Vista’s development was also very public. So when features that were originally slated to ship with Vista (WinFS, for one) were subsequently dropped, there was tremendous coverage and criticism from the blogosphere. Contrast that with the days of Windows 2000 (and XP), when very few ordinary users knew (or cared) about the development of the operating system. It’s insights like these that periodically wake you up to the power of the democratic web.

I’m also amazed at how good Apple is at keeping its development efforts secret. At the same time, Apple’s products don’t have to have interoperability with the sheer number of devices and software that Windows does.

One of those negatives of popularity, I suppose.

In fact, one of the tenets of the “new Web”, or Web 2.0, as it’s more popularly known, is that value is moving up the software stack, and that applications are now commodities; the real value lies in services that are offered via those applications. For instance, I’m writing this document on Writely, a sort of Wordpad-for-the-Web. Mind you, it isn’t an application in the traditional sense of the term, as much as it’s a service. In any case, the important thing here is that it doesn’t matter what browser application I’m using to access this document on Writely. I’m using Firefox, but I might as well have been using Internet Explorer. Or Opera. Or Safari. Or… well, you get the idea. The browser does not matter any more. It is a commodity. A lot of application “services” today run on the same principle. All of Google’s offerings: Search. Local. Maps. Gmail. Orkut. Blogger. Writely itself. Take a look at the hottest tech startups today. Flickr. del.icio.us. 37signals. YouTube. Digg. Bloglines. Spot the pattern? How you access the application services does not matter.

The browser is just the way we access the Internet today. What will matter is how we will access the Internet tomorrow. I’ve said this in the past, and I’ll say it again here. Google Desktop (GD) is the application to watch out for. The future will belong to what are known as Internet-connected widgets, or as MS calls them, Internet-connected components (ICC) . These will be used on desktops, mobile devices, and any other appliances that will be connected to the Web in the future. And GD is one application that uses these ICCs already. Almost every single plugin connects to the Internet to gather the data it needs. Or take a look at Konfabulator, deemed valuable enough to be bought by Yahoo!. These widgets are the future of how information and content on the Internet is going to be created and accessed. Taking it to the next level, imagine these widgets on your smartphone. Or in your TV/TiVo. Or in your car. That is the opportunity for ICCs.

So does MS need Internet Explorer?
The area we’ve talked about above is where MS’s future opportunities are. Ray Ozzie and his team have to find a business model to monetize this opportunity. That’ll require his deep technical insight. It’ll also require immense technical talent from within MS to build a programming model around the new Web. And here’s where I’m going to step in and make this assertion.

Microsoft should stop developing Internet Explorer.

Instead, it ought to concentrate on building the Internet into the very heart of the next Windows, whether it’s the successor to Windows Vista (for the desktop), or Windows Mobile (for mobile devices). Firefox is doing a better job than IE in every respect. It’s the better browser by far. Only Opera can come close to being as good. IE isn’t MS’s competitive advantage in the least, in many respects, it’s a liability. A wise move would be to cease development on the browser – any development on IE would be simply playing catch-up to Firefox and Opera. It makes no sense to compete in such a market when you’re better off building up tomorrow’s market. Microsoft needs to jump to (in the words of Guy Kawasaki) “the next curve”. Or in the words of John Sculley, “change the rules of the game”, as he did at the helm of Pepsi.

I sense that Windows Live is another mistake that the company’s making. Not the idea of web-enabled services – that’s fine by me. But the fact that Windows Live works best on IE and has problems with Firefox, Opera, Safari means that we’re going down the same path again – trying to “lock-in” users to their browser, when it doesn’t make sense – does the value lie in Windows Live application services, or does it lie in Internet Explorer? There’s no rationale in their policy right now, and it looks as if it’s degenerating into an ego issue – stop the spread of Firefox at any cost. If Ray Ozzie is to be believed through his “The Internet Services disruption ” memo, MS is now a services company, only with multiple product offerings. (As an aside, this model is precisely what Gates had alluded to in his book “Business @ The Speed Of Thought” more than half a decade ago. Talk about visionary!) So why is it competing in a senseless, hopelessly commoditized market which isn’t even a revenue source, where all it gets is bad publicity, and where its product offering is way behind competitors from a feature and ease-of-use point of view?

If Microsoft has the courage to back up its vision with action, it ought to include a copy of Firefox with Windows Vista, as the default browser. But the home page ought to be Windows Live. Hmm – now that’s a move that makes sense!