Windows Live OneCare – Starting to give up
Here is another example why.
Problem or no problem?
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April 17th, 2009 at 12:03 AM
Okay, I’ll play along. I’m guessing you believe there is a bug there. But what would you say it is?
-adam
April 17th, 2009 at 1:35 AM
Yeah – that’s terrifying. Nearly 8 Gb and not enough space…
This *is* a problem – I’d say, it’s a bug: Built-in Defrag has a minimum of around 14 % free space, in order to start up. (You’re currently at 13 %). This value is perhaps a leftover from earlier days, when harddrives where significantly smaller ? I don’t know if that’s true, but 8 Gb spare room on the HD is a lot. And thus I would see this as a feature which originally saved the program from failure, but now has been outdated by the hardware development rate.
But mind you, this limitation comes from the built-in defrag-program (and you might read from the comment that I’ve been painfully hit by this also
.
Another problem is, that this limitation is not understood by OneCare. It ought to suggest you make room on the HD – so that it could defrag it. That it doesn’t support my hunch that this is an outdated, arbitrary, unpublished limitation.
April 17th, 2009 at 7:14 PM
As stated by Carsten, I would say that the bug here is that the software does not tell the user how to resolve the problem. It is all well and good to know you need more free space on the HD, but how much is needed?
That is the information that needs to be displayed, and it is available because the program knows that it is not enough, therefore it could tell the user how much is needed. I would also suggest that there be a link that would go to a page explaining why the free space was required, as in these days especially, it cannot be expected that a majority of users would look up that information up.
I believe that it is essential that almost all error messages should indicate how the problem can be resolved.
–Steve
April 20th, 2009 at 5:28 AM
I guess Adam isn’t going to comment on his own post, but I agree with Steve about where the bug is. It is not that you need more space, it is how the issue is communicated.
-adam
April 30th, 2009 at 11:12 AM
Adam (Adam Quite, not Adam Goucher [hi Adam!]):
This reminds me of the “Is there a problem here?” portion of Ben Simo’s QualityFrog blog. Seems like a good candidate for that. http://blog.isthereaproblemhere.com/