I went to grab my trusty 30Gb Zune today and it froze on startup - the "Zune" logo stayed stuck on the screen indefinitely. Hitting the web to look for techniques on how to reset the device yielded a few tips but nothing that solved my issue.

I did spot that I wasn't alone, however - and the newswires are currently hot with the word that this problem is affecting many - if not all - of the original 30Gb Zunes. The support forums are getting pretty busy.

UPDATE: Official confirmation says here that the issue will resolve itself after the date ticks over to 1st January. This is an issue relating to the fact that 2008 was a leap year.

Microsoft has at time of writing, not said anything other than "we're aware there is a problem and are working to fix it": how some potential fix might manifest itself remains to be seen - hopefully, the customer experience will be similar to the so-called XBox "ring of death" scenario - I've had that happen on 2 XBoxes, and I have to say the smoothness and quality of the return experience is the best I've ever had from any company. Maybe that's where the $1bn was spent...

Anyway, to Zunes... (and note this is the original, 30Gb Zune only - later models - 80/120 and the flash models - are unaffected). Reportedly it only affects the latest firmware - from November 2008 - too, so if you've a Zune that's been sitting in a drawer for a couple of months then it'd probably be OK.

How to reset the device - in essence, reboot it by holding the back button and pressing up on the D-pad. This didn't work for me in the "frozen" state.

How to reformat the device - I could only get this to work by waiting for the device to run out of power, then plug it in (and get the battery charging icon) and as soon as it began its start up procedure, press the back button and hold both the left part of the D-pad and the button in the middle of the pad. It did start the procedure but appeared to hang at stage 4...

A reported fix is available by opening the Zune up and disconnecting/reconnecting the battery - instructions for the brave, here. This would ordinarily void any warranty, though my device is about a year our of warranty anyway. Maybe I'll wait for a few days and see what Redmond says, though...

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about Thread Compressor on here – it’s an add-in to Outlook which removes unnecessary emails, on the assumption that most people reply to mail and leave the original intact, so you could keep the last mail in each branch of a thread, and remove all the others.

Way back when I was still developing TC, I tried to get it included on the Office Downloads section of Microsoft.com, but our legal department was (with some justification) very nervous about us offering a download which would go through the end user’s mailbox like a dose of salts, deleting stuff. So it stayed (more or less) an internal tool: I even started developing a “version 5” with a much groovier UI and some extra features.

Included in the v5 beta (which is a real pain to install nowadays – the previous v4.2.030 version has nearly the same feature set and is a lot more self contained), was a piece of logic which captured stats on TC usage and emailed them back to me.

Since many people at MS are still running that beta (it’s a long story, but the source code went south so it’ll never get out of “beta” state), I still get maybe 20-30 statistics mails a day…

Since August 2003 when the first statistics email arrived – from me, kind-of naturally – until 24th April 2007 (when I last did an analysis of the stats), TC v5 beta had scanned over 400m email messsages and had compressed over 30m, worth nearly half a terabyte of email data.

To the reader, the spoils

Well, I finally decided – in an “ask forgiveness rather than permission” move – to make the last complete and stable version available for download.

It’s not particularly elegant looking by modern standards (given that most of it was written 7 years ago in VB6) but it does work, even on Windows 7 (x86 and x64) and Office 2007. Basically, anything post-Office 2000/Windows 2000 should be OK.

A reader called Mark Ruggles emailed me the other day and said:

“It is fantastic and it works like a champ in Outlook 2007. I turned it loose on my Inbox and my archive and I deleted 103Mb of redundant data. I sent it out to some of my colleagues and my manager used it cutting his archives down by 2Gb.
…
This is the coolest utility I’ve found in a long time.”

So, thanks to Mark's comment, I’ve now registered www.threadcompressor.co.uk and posted install instructions and a download file up there.

OK, this is pretty far removed from the norm of an IT blog, but it is the weekend so I feel it's allowed. The topic has some technical (practical) aspects, and is something I've been talking with a few people about lately.

I've seen various techniques on how to cook steak properly, but I came across one individual's website (which, frustratingly, I can no longer find) a few years ago, which summarised everything beatifully and set me trying out a few different ways from the norm. In a nutshell: cook the steak from room temperature, oil the meat and not the pan, use a pan as hot as you can, and let the steak rest for at least as long as you cooked it.

It's all about heat

I used to work in a professional kitchen. Well, I was a waiter in a nice restaurant, which meant I spent a bit of time in a pro kitchen (generally on the "other" side of the hot plate). Professional chefs seemingly have a duty to verbally abuse their waiting staff, which mine did with gusto if not applomb.

Several years later, I was being shown round a call centre (as The Client), when I recognised one of the chefs who'd been giving me verbal, was now trying to sell software over the phone. Presumably, the world of cooking hadn't worked out for him quite as he'd hoped.

Anyway, one thing I learned about cooking steak back then was, it's all about heat. Now the trick to cooking a good fillet steak (and that's pronounced fill-it, not fill-eh, unless you currently live in France), is to try to get close to restaurant kitchen heat levels in a domestic kitchen. It can make for a lot of smoke, but it's very effective. Here's the deal...

• Take your fillet steak out of the fridge at least 20 minutes before you want to cook it, to allow it to get to room temperature. Taking a cold steak and throwing straight onto hot metal won't do anything for the tenderness of the end result.
   
• Pat the steak with kitchen roll to remove any excess moisture (if the meat is wet, when you put it on the heat, that water will vapourise and only form a barrier between the steak and the heat source).
   
• Once patted dry, rub a little sunflower or vegetable oil into the steak, with your fingers (don't use olive oil - it burns at too low a temperature), and leave to sit for a few minutes. Season with salt & pepper if you like.
   
• Put a small, dry, frying pan on maximum heat on the biggest ring/burner on your hob. Leave it there for a least a couple of minutes. In the meantime, go and open some windows. Things are likely to get smokey. I've heard of some people leaving the pan on heat for as much as 10 minutes, but you might struggle to see the cooker by the time you're ready to put the fillet on.
   
• When the pan is as hot as you can suffer, gently place the steak onto the surface. After 30 seconds or so, move it so it doesn't stick and burn. Now it's a straight function of how hot your pan is, how big the steak is, and how you like it cooked, which will determine how long to leave it there. I tend to find 2-3 minutes each side will give a nice medium-rare on a decent sized fillet on a pan that's been on heat for a few minutes.

There's a trick to being able to tell when the steak is properly cooked, and it involves prodding your own hand. Pressing on the surface with your finger, you'll feel the flesh give way a little, and it should be about the same firmness as if you press with the finger on the fleshy part of your hand when pinching thumb and fingers together. It's easier to show than describe:

So if you touch thumb and index finger, the firmness of your hand will be about the same as a rare steak, while thumb and little finger will be more like well done. Experience and practice will help you out here, and don't be scared of cutting the steak to check it's cooked as you'd like - better a well-cooked dish with a cut in the middle, than an undercooked but nicely presented one.

I can't really understand wanting to cook a lovely fillet of beef to "well done". You might as well save a bit of cash and buy a cheaper cut. In fact, according to Anthony Bourdain (and I've heard this of other chefs too), the skankier bits of beef get set aside for serving to restaurant customers who like their meat good 'n burnt - with a label on the meat saying "SFWD", or "Save For Well Done".

Finally, take the steak off the heat and put on a warmed plate and just let it rest for 10 minutes or so, before serving. You might want to deglaze the pan with a little red wine and maybe a knob of butter, to make a nice sauce. Mmmmmmmmm.

Here's an appeal - nearly 8 years ago, I wrote* a little COM addin for the-then new Outlook 2000, which "compressed threads". The idea was that it could take an email thread (eg a discussion over a period of time and a number of responses, from any number of people, and typically sent to a distribution list for the purposes of discussion), and compress that thread down to the salient points. It has evolved over a few iterations since but has been largely dormant for the best part of 5 years - it does everything I need it to do, so I've never developed it any further (and if truth be told, a hard disk crash blew away the source for the last version and I could never face going back to a previous beta and re-developing the changes I'd made).

I'd like to understand if anyone else would like it.

The basic assumption with Thread Compressor is that when people reply using Outlook, they tend to add all their comments at the top - some do inline replies, but most eschew that - and don't edit the original contents. If this assumption holds true, then it would be possible to compress all discussion threads down to only holding onto the final email or the final post (to a public folder) since it will contain the entire history of that branch of the thread. Of course, there may be multiple branches of the thread, and Thread Compressor handles that.

The first time many people run TC on a large folder, it will routinely get rid of 50% or more of the content, so proves useful in slimming down folders where you archive stuff, or folders where distribution list contents are sent by Outlook rules, never to be read but to be indexed by Windows Desktop Search or similar.

In my last run, I scanned almost 1Gb of email and the Thread Compressor discovered about 21Mb of mail which could be removed... not quite as dramatic as 50%, but it saved me reading over 1,000 emails and it reduced my mailbox size a little...

There are a few obvious benefits to thread compression...

• It reduces the size of your mailbox, so keeps you under-quota
• It removes spurious email so you have less stuff to plough through
• When searching, it reduces the number of hits since it won't return every mail in a thread which contains the same word(s)

... but some obvious potential downsides...

• The assumption at the top of this post. If I reply to someone's email, but change the contents of their original message in the reply, then TC will retain the modified version and it will look like the originator really said that. There may be ways to work around this limitation now, but I never bothered to figure them out.
• Legal compliance - maybe you need to keep a copy of every mail for compliance purposes: if so, users programmatically deleting messages could be a *bad thing*.
• erm, can't think of any/many more...

If you think this kind of functionality should be either built into Outlook or available as an opt-in addon, then please let me know. We have many thousands of regular users of Thread Compressor inside Microsoft. It would be cool to think of millions more outside as well...

//Ewan

* The really smart bit of TC was actually put together by a guy called Peter Lamsdale. All I did was take his algorithm - which I still have difficulty understanding much less explaining - and strap a UI around it. An earlier version of TC was published (unofficially) on a website and an article was written about it by Evan Morris. There is even an unconnected MSDN bit of sample code which is nowhere near as effective (IMHO)

My wife's small business has recently had a requirement to upgrade a couple of PCs, after 5 or 6 years. Since I am ultimately responsible for all their IT (and I am not proud of what they have - I cut all sorts of corners to make my life easy, but they don't know how lean it is), I've always bought Dell kit for them since it's been good quality, relatively cheap, it's quick and easy.

Looking around on their site, I figured the new Dell Vostro desktop range might be worth a look - and since the machines were shipped with "Just the Software you need - no Trialware installed" then it would save me time in rebuilding the systems when they arrived (as I'd generally do).

There's a great discussion over on Steve Clayton's blog, about tweaking Vista, and on Computerworld on how to take the garbage off your new system. I'd hoped to avoid any of this by just going with a well-tested, modern, high-volume desktop, so that everything just works with software that's been available for the best part of a year, on Vista Business (no downgrade to Windows XP for us - even if Dell is now offering it as a "feature").

OOBE

The Out-Of-Box-Experience was typical of a decent PC - lots of boxes, lots of packaging, printed manuals in about a dozen languages (which all go straight in the bin). It's pretty straightforward plugging everything together now, and in no time we're up and running.

I bet if this was a new Mac, it would have a lot less spurious cables and bits of paper.

No Trial-ware but plenty of crap-ware

ZDnet has talked about the problems of "crapware" (including relative to Dell) cluttering up new PCs, slowing things down, frustrating end users and annoying power users by giving them hours of work to clean things up.

On starting up the PC, we had Google Desktop indexing everrything, even though Vista was doing that already. We had a Dell/Google Browser Helper Object just waiting to redirect every bad URL or search, to a site that showed Dell adverts (called Dell's Browser Address Redirector). Welcome to the world of "choice" - I'm almost surprised they didn't install Firefox, Opera and Safari, just in case the end user felt like installing a different browser without bothering to download it. Pity the users who don't want all this guff and have to take it off.

There are 3 separate ISP sign-up applications which are irrelevant to this small business, as well as a bunch of other bits & pieces which come from neither Dell nor Microsoft. Each of them has a program group in the start menu, and an entry in Control Panel's Remove Programs section.

There are obviously some useful 3rd party addons (though I was going to rip out the - trial version - McAfee anti-virus, spyware and firewall, and replace with OneCare), such as DVD decoder, or CD burner. But even they don't always work smoothly - there's some Roxio software which as well as writing CD/DVDs, also seems to monitor folders on disk for some sharing function.

These machines are sold for small business use - why would I want to have 3rd party software cluttering up the system tray and occupying memory & CPU, monitoring folders for sharing media, on the LAN? In looking to switch off the monitoring, I right-clicked on the system tray icon and (not seeing any other option), choose an option to do with Managing the folder sharing, on the basis that it might give me an option of switching it off.

Boom. Visual C++ 6.0 runtime error. Every time. On both machines.

I don't want to beat up on Dell specifically, but this is an example of a poor customer experience that is 100% down to the PC OEM to fix. Don't install all this software on a PC unless it's essential - or at least make it easy for users to revert to some kind of vanilla OS.

How many customers would assume this C++ runtime error was a Windows problem? Or would blame a slow machine on spurious Vista performance issues, when it's every bit as likely to be caused by unnecessary and unwanted software running on the background, because the ISV has paid the OEM to include it on new machine builds..?

Maybe Microsoft should get into building PC hardware, and at least will have soup-to-nuts control over the hardware and software experience.