Hey, look-- it's Virtual Friday, and you all know what that means: it's Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day! We know, you've had to do without your weekly dose for a while, what with our recent production outages and all... which is why, instead of just skipping a show like we did last week, we're bringing you Friday on a Tuesday, just so you can get your anti-Redmond mojo workin'! Blatant disregard for the days of the week, all for the sake of getting in a jab or two at the Gates Brigade and thus restoring meaning to your otherwise empty little lives? Clearly we deserve some sort of humanitarian award or something.

But we'll worry about commendations later, because this is too good to leave alone for another minute: faithful viewer Glen Carpenter dished up a CNET article which reveals that Tablet PC users-- yes, all six of them-- are currently tussling with "significant performance problems" after having upgraded to Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005. Apparently there's a memory leak or something, and the onscreen panel that handles stylus input (as in, the thing that makes a Tablet PC a Tablet PC in the first place) hogs more and more of the system's resources as time goes on, eventually starving other processes and grinding things to a near-halt. Bummer.

But is it really fair to bag on Microsoft just because of this one bug, glaring though it may be? After all, every software release has its glitches. True, Microsoft's products do seem to have way more than their fair share; remember Microsoft's own list of 63,000 known and documented bugs in Windows 2000 when it shipped? But even so, we're thinking that it's not really the bug that's bash-worthy, so much as the remedy: "Until a fix is ready, Microsoft is advising those running the OS to reboot their machines daily." Which is sort of the tech support equivalent of the classic patient/doctor exchange, "Doc, it hurts when I do this"/"Stop doing that."

Actually, come to think of it, even the remedy isn't worthy of much ridicule, since Microsoft is perfectly forthright in saying that the daily reboot is just a workaround until a permanent fix in the form of a software patch is ready. So is Microsoft actually bashproof in this whole scenario? Ha! Right. No, if you want the real bash-worthy stuff, look no further than the company's rationalization of the performance-drag workaround: "The Microsoft representative said that most users already reboot daily and said those who do so are unlikely to notice any performance problems."

Daily reboots as a matter of course? What, do these people figure that since Microsoft was kind enough to give them a one-finger salute, they're somehow obligated to use it at least once a day? Or are Tablet PCs just so unstable in the first place that crashing daily is business as usual? Because neither is exactly flattering to Microsoft and its customers. Why, we can just see the billboards now: "Tablet PCs-- Generally Useless and Widely Unpopular, But At Least You Get To Restart Them Every Day, Whether They're Saddled With Performance Bugs Or Not!" We sense a Clio in the offing.