As a tech writer, one of my biggest pet peeves is the plethora of bad advice littered across almost every web site dedicated to system tweaking. Besides the tweaks that simply don't work, some of them will actually cause your computer to run even slower—or worse. Let's examine some of the most offensive myths out there regarding PC performance tweaking, and debunk them once and for all.

When I wrote the first version of this article six years ago, I called it “Why Free Software usability tends to suck”. The best open source applications and operating systems are more usable now than they were then. But this is largely from slow incremental improvements, and low-level competition between projects and distributors. Major problems with the design process itself remain largely unfixed.

Many of these problems are with volunteer software in general, not Free Software in particular. Hobbyist proprietary programs are often hard to use for many of the same reasons. But the easiest way of getting volunteers to contribute to a program is to make it open source. And while thousands of people are now employed in developing Free Software, most of its developers are volunteers. So it’s in Free Software that we see volunteer software’s usability problems most often.

When you think of the Wikimedia Foundation, what comes to mind? For us it’s immediately Wikipedia and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales who started the foundation. It’s based in San Francisco, and the foundation operates several wiki projects including the ever-so-popular Wikipedia. Wikipedia is obviously the most popular site that’s part of the foundation, but there are other projects that are gaining some ground. Today we’ll be taking a look at some of the Wikimedia Foundation Projects that are currently going on, aside from their most popular, Wikipedia. They include: Wikiversity, Wikiquote, Wiki Books, and Wikispecies.