The User is Online - Be Responsive

I’ve used a personal computer for a while now, and I think I’m a fairly experienced user of one. There are some things though that I’d just like to work different to how they do now.

User Online / Offline Mode

I often get my computer to do multiple things at once - a lot of things, I probably overwork it. And when I’m typing at it or navigating with the mouse I want it to be responsive to what I’m doing. So often there are other tasks that the computer is doing which mean it isn’t responsive to me. What I think should be done about this is for the computer to monitor my actions. To actively check at high priority if I’m typing on the keyboard or moving the mouse. And when I am to only shift priority to processes that are supporting my keyboard or mouse activity. But how can the computer differentiate between processes like this? I think that if a window has focus and there is recent UI activity in the past couple of seconds then the process supporting that window should get more priority. And what I mean by more priority is increased CPU priority and also increased Disk access priority. Disk is a particular resource that when busy can ruin my personal computer experience because stuff I’m trying to do doesn’t respond well. Think of this as User Online / Offline mode, make the PC able to tell when the User is Online just like Internet Explorer can tell when the Internet is online or offline.

Do stuff to support the User

The other thing that I’d like from my personal computer is for it to do things for me when I’m not using it. I mean now that it knows when I am interacting with it and want responsiveness it can also know when I’m not interacting with it and it can do resource intensive things for me. Like scan for viruses, yes please do this when I’m offline and stop immediately if I start using the computer. And how about sorting my email, or my files, or my contacts, who have I regularly communicated with on email and what other contact information do I have about them. Things like this would help me organise my life better I think.