How not to write software help

[ewx]

More and more computers seems to be black. I approve, on aesthetic and historical grounds.

Setting up LNR's new computer last night went fairly smoothly though I did run into a small wrinkle.

One of the installation screens asks you want kind of keyboard you have. Among the bewildering array of options are 'United Kingdom' and 'United Kingdom extended'. So, which did she have? The keyboard had neither description printed anywhere on it, nor did the box it came in. Obviously I hit the help button, which was very good at using animated arrows to tell me which menu the list of keyboards was in but did not describe how to discover what kind of keyboard you actually had.

This has been a running sore in the computer world, actually. X11's configuration often names keyboards for the number of keys; all well and good, but do they really expect you to count the keys on the keyboard to find out how many it has (given that the numbers are typically just over 100)?

Obviously diagrams would help, and doubtless there are plenty on the web (though the MS site which claimed to have them that I tried from my Mac didn't work in Firefox or Safari) but no matter how good they are, unless you have an already-working computer they're going to be of rather limited usefulness. Would it really have hurt to include diagrams in the installer?For that matter you'd have thought that the transition to USB would be the ideal point at which to make keyboards plug-and-play. But, apparently this didn't occur to anyone, or if it did then nobody's taking advantage of it.