I’ve spent the last four hours optimizing my Vista machine, trying to get some semblance of productivity out of it. I’ve uninstalled over half my software, disabled all non-essential services, defragged all four hard drives, and even tweaked a few registry settings.
And it’s still the slowest operating system I’ve ever seen. I kid you not, I was more productive and my machine was FAR more responsive back in 1993 when I was programming in Borland C++ on a 80386 running at a scorching 33MHz with an 800MB hard drive and 32MB of RAM. In DOS.
I couldn’t help but laugh out loud (startling both my wife and my cat) when, after all of that trouble, I got the following dialog when attempting to perform a little maintenance on one of my rarely-used directories :
And you know…. It’s only funny because it’s true 
Popularity: 18% [?]
I was just getting ready to delete the copy of the snapshot above from my local machine, and had to get another chuckle from looking at it, when a new chuckle struck…
It’s an extremely common task in software development to create routines that convert time spans to natural language representations, for instance 1000ms to “One Second”, 60000ms to “One Minute”, etc., as well as handling the singular/plural cases (”One minute”, “Two Minutes”).
Having been assigned that task more times than I care to count, it’s perhaps not surprising that it occurred to me that Microsoft has intentionally made a case for turning 1131984 hours (or 67919040 minutes) into days. I can imagine the developer thinking “okay… Well, we should put Days in ‘just in case’ but I doubt anyone will ever get a number *that* high”, and if he thought of weeks or months at all I’d be willing to bet that management would have decided that “47166 Days” sounds just a little less scary on a psychological level than “129 Years”.