Progress Bars

Submitted by Rick on June 9, 2006 - 5:55pm.

Riding Shotgun with Rick

A customer of mine had a great observation today that has bothered me for years; what's up with progress bars when we install programs or perform some functions? Almost all installation programs give you a progress bar usually with a 'percent done' label. What drives me crazy is when the bar reaches the end then STARTS OVER!! Arghhhhhh!! And in some cases it will repeat three or four times! Or you get a scan or installation program that moves quickly to 80 or 90% and then stalls out for three times as long as the first 80%. Frustrating! I'm no programmer, but certainly there is some algorithm that can be utilized to give computer users a better idea of how much REAL time is left in an installation or procees. What do you think?

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