Tian Bai

Joel Spolsky wrote a article "Choices = Headaches", in which he complains the bad design of the nine options, two icons and seven menu items, Windows Vista provided for users to leave their computer.  Actually, the purpose of introducing the new mode ‘Sleep’ (the leftmost icon) is to address this kind of complaints against WinXP.

In the Features for Performance, you can find that ‘Sleep’ mode behaves differently on laptops from on desktops.  It’s a good design.  The only pitfall is its name.  It would be much better if it’s called ‘Leave’, with a tooltip ‘Let Vista take care of it’.  Correspondingly, the menu can be named as ‘For Geeks’, with a tooltip ‘You are on your own’.