Ask Leo! #500 – Another Milestone! Nightly reboots, unsubscribing from spam, backing up Hotmail and more…

You can also read mobis through the Kindle Cloud reader. This is basically a web browser app. I use it on Chrome since I can't load the Kindle app on my PC at work. After you sign in, your library is available. Pretty cool.

Yes, Bank & CC statements are available online. What if, say, you switch banks or credit cards? As soon as you are no longer a customer, you will lose access to the historical online statements. Additionally, Lots of data that I would classify as "sensitive" arrives in the mail without being easily available online. Everyone has their own level of comfort, I guess.

I also think the "search for anything you want" system has limitations, as well. Let's say it's tax time and you want to get documentation for all charitable contributions for the year. Without categorization, you can't just search for "contribution". You would have to remember the name of every organization (or some other data that would likely be on the documents you scanned), for example, and search separately for that.

This is just one example, but it points out the limitations. For any system to work, you need to know it's limitations so you can plan around them where necessary.

Maybe it's as easy as hand-writing "TAX" on things during the year so that then becomes a searchable term - I don't know.

Lastly, don't forget to backup the Evernote database. Sure, they are a thriving company now, but what about in 10 years? Can you even convert their format to something readable if their online presence disappeared?

I download my bank and CC statements in PDF form for long term archives. You don't have to leave the institution ... sometimes they only keep the last year or two available online. And, not terribly surprising I hope, is the fact that I do backup my Evernote database. :-) I get what you're saying about search - I really do - and I had many of those same reservations. And yet ... I have always found what I'm looking for and I've been doing this for something like three years now.

Going on two years (only seems like three!) and we're still saying get used to it? Time to trade that clunker in! Seriously, Mary Jo Foley indicates that the return of the start menu is presently off for 8.2 and not to be added until Nine. Her best guess is that's because Microsoft now considers 8 a lost cause; tainted, and they need a sharper demarcation between versions. Paul Thurrott concurs but they are quick to say it is only speculation on their part.

I would expect you not to "lean" the statistics your way Leo. Win 8 is already a major disaster but of course, not for the same reasons Vista was. Sure, "many" people are getting used to and even liking W8 but not statistically. In fact Windows 7 has been growing faster in market share recently and XP is still more than double the share of W8.

Further, the intrinsic behavior of W8 just doesn't seem to be where the future is going...it seems more like the ecological niches of touch in mobile and wireless mouse and keyboard in desktop use with large screens is preferred with very little call for the opposite in the other's domain.

Being a desktop only user its like they took a perfectly good car and attached one of those three-wheeled cars Mr. Bean's neighbor drove. Apps are good in a pinch and for single purpose (like desktop gadgets) but they are ridiculously inadequate for a full on power user, still after a year and a half, so i don't think they will ever supplant desktop programs in any significant way whatsoever, just as the more complex and intricate interfaced programs will make no headway in small screen mobile devices.

In other words, Microsoft built an OS for an imaginary consumer for the most part. To complete the analogy, I would say Microsoft built a concept car that should never have gone into production; but to be fair, we and they didn't really know that until it was built and run around the block a few times.

You seem to always write as if though we haven't ever tried everything else (taskbar only, desktop toolbar, other custom toolbars, other third party organisation tools) in the pursuit of efficiency. Maybe many don't and efficiency remains a concept but those of us who are considering all of that all the time so that computers hopefully don't take up more and more time as we get "sucked" into them, ARE, and I've never met an OS that needed more work to get it up to par with XP and Win7 than W8. To be fair, before SP2 for Vista, that OS was impossible to bring up to parity.