It looks like you're writing a letter ...

New (to me) PC installed over the weekend. Fun!

Its predecessor was acquired in January 2001 and ran Windows ME. It's no concidence that Windows ME was named after a painful and debilitating disease. After a couple of years it was upgraded to Windows 2000 by a passing teenage whizkid. It ran a little slower, but much, much better. Earlier this year I installed Nortons 2006 on it and it went from a little slower to massively slower.

So, a faster PC was always on the cards. The present one is only on loan, part and parcel of some freelance work that I've taken on, so will have to be given back eventually. But for the time being it has speed. It has Sophos. It has XP ... hmm. XP. Does exactly the same as 2000, but lets Microsoft take their insistence on micromanaging your computing experience to unprecedented levels, with a brutal blocky colour scheme reminiscent of Windows 3.1 (and why anyone would want to reminisce about that is beyond me).

Microsoft do so love to be helpful. They give you that bloody paperclip. They categorise the control panel so you can't find anything. But when it comes to being usefully helpful ...

I was working on some text in Word on the new PC. I instinctively pressed CTRL+W to get a word count, and the document closed itself. I was forgetting. You see, there are two keyboard shortcuts I always set up when I get a new copy of Word. One is the word count. This exists under the Tools menu, but I don't want to go to a menu everytime I want a word count (which is often). CTRL+W is the most cripplingly obvious keyboard shortcut imaginable to get a word count. So why doesn't Word have it? Why instead does it have two separate ways of closing a document? (Small prize for anyone who can tell me the other.)

The other is one that doesn't exist at all in Word, so I have to set it up as a macro. In fact it hasn't existed in any word processor I have ever used except Protext, which was an imperfection-free ASCII text editor on my old Amstrad PCW. Just about the most common typing error in the whole wide world is transposing two letters. eBn instead of Ben, natidisestablishmentarianism instead of antidisestablishmentarianism, etc. With Protext you could press two keys and swap the wrong letters the right way round. With any copy of Word that has passed through my hands, you can press ALT+A to do the same thing.

The micromanagers of Microsoft have set things up so that when I put my memory stick in the USB port, I am now told that there are a variety of file formats on this, what would I like to do? Strangely, I already knew what was on my own memory stick so I would like you to JUST OPEN THE F*&^ING THING like Windows 2000 did. See? They've found yet another way to be fascistically helpful. But, in all the years Word has been around, they still haven't got round to adding those two simple keystrokes.

Gah.