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James Fallows

James Fallows - James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book, China Airborne, will be published in May.
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James Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has also lived in Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He is also now the chair in U.S. media at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.

Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once; he has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His two most recent books, Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009), are based on his writings for The Atlantic; he is at work on another book about China. He is married to Deborah Fallows, author of the recent book Dreaming in Chinese. They have two married sons.

Fallows welcomes and frequently quotes from reader mail sent via the "Email" button below. Unless you specify otherwise, we consider any incoming mail available for possible quotation -- but not with the sender's real name unless you explicitly state that it may be used. If you are wondering why Fallows does not use a "Comments" field below his posts, please see previous explanations here and here.
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Nerds only: pulling the plug on Xobni

By James Fallows

May 7 2008, 5:55 AM ET

I mentioned two days ago that I'd liked the idea of the spiffy Outlook-indexer Xobni, but that when I'd tried a beta version in January it had slowed my PC to a point of paralysis.

The new release has been getting a lot of buzz, so I thought I'd try it again.

No dice. After two days of torpor I have just taken it off the machine. Made the already-glacial startup process of Outlook (under Vista) almost interminable. Used so many CPUs and -- especially -- so much memory that the computer wasn't good for anything else. Could just be me. Could just be my computer. Could be the evil Vista (on the computer where I installed Xobni). Could be entirely different for you. Just reporting my experience.

And maybe it's not just me. When you uninstall Xobni, it asks you why. The choices:

"Please tell us why you uninstalled so we can improve:
" 1. I wasn't using it.
" 2. It used too many computer resources
" 3. Outlook froze during normal operation
" 4. It made Outlook startup too slow.
" 5. Sidebar disappeared or stopped loading
" 6. It slowed down my Outlook.
" 7. I just temporarily uninstalled and will reinstall.
" 8. It did not index my mail properly
" 9. Outlook crashed"

I checked 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9. But when they have a new version...

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