My Top 10 Tech Annoyances

Not wishing to sound negative but …

1. Wireless mouse battery life. And wireless keyboards.

2. People who still send Zip files.

3. All iPod FM car kits.

4. Windows laptops’ unfathomable mix of suspend-resume/sleep/hibernate routines (bonus points for denoting each mode with an unfathomable hieroglyphic on a keyboard shortcut).

5. Windows resume routines that take longer than re-booting.

6. Wi-fi router/modems with no physical on-off button (that is, almost all of them), despite the fact you have to constantly reset your wireless network.

7. Mobile data being so much more expensive in NZ than Australia.

8. People who use more than three PowerPoint slides.

9. The new Google image search.

10. Smartphones whose batteries run out in about a day (that is, all of them).

11. Geographic restrictions on commercial movie downloads.

12. Browser tabs that peel off (never when you want them to) to create a new browser window. Who uses this feature intentionally? And after they peel off, there seems to be no way to re-attach them.

13. Microsoft, Google et al telling you that a website crash can be contained to a single browser tab. But it always, always, crashes your whole browser.

14. The marketing idiots who come up with battery life estimates for notebooks. Six hours! Eight hours! Yeah, right. And don’t forget to tell the punters that actual running time will halve in a couple of years as their battery degrades. You did forget? Oh dear. Maybe next time.

15. Mouse gesture shortcuts for touchpads and web browsers. Always kick in when you don’t want them too.

16. Monster Vision animated stadium advertising. Great for people who prefer watching galloping logos to rugby or football. But as distracting as all Hell for anyone who loves sport (and they wonder why rugby ratings are falling).

17. Getting a DVD in the mail from Fatso.co.nz when you got impatient two months ago and downloaded it from iTunes.

18. Microscopic type size for Windows, browsers etc on a high definition 15-inch or smaller laptop screen – closely followed by the fuzzy, low-definition type delivered if you depart from the recommended native 1920 x 1080 resolution.

19. Web forms that wipe all your data and make you start again if you forget a single item.

20. Slow websites. What’s up with that?

21. Automatic bullet points.

22. Websites that make you sit through a Flash intro every time you visit. Still.

23. Yellow.

24. iPad apps that just rearrange the same contents as the web version of a site. Oh, there is one difference: they take 40 seconds to load.

25. Hitting Shut Down, then reaching for your laptop as you race out the door ... only to see the message: "Installing update 1 of 7. Do not turn off your computer".

26. That lull between the estimated time an install/download time dialog box counts down to zero, and something actually happening.

27. $1000 smartphones with cheap, clumsy battery covers.

Was that more than 10? Time flew. Feel free to add your own in the comments section below.