Microsoft, please stop changing my default save location to SkyDrive

Ok, I get it already Microsoft. You would really like it if “everybody” saved “everything” to SkyDrive, or OneDrive, or whatever. It ties people into the ecosystem, and you can tout the one place for everything mantra. And no, I don’t have any problems with the whole Cloud security thing. I am over that.

But here is a dose of reality. My work machine is more than six years old, running a Pentium 4 3.00Ghz CPU. We have a single DSL line, shared by a dozen machines, with a max upload speed of 5.42Mbps and typical download speed of 0.42Mbps. When I try to (unintentionally) save an email attachment to SkyDrive at work, I generally have to wait nearly a minute. Same thing when I try to open/save a file using Word, Excel, Publisher, etc. IT SLOWS ME DOWN! That is counter productive. I have had to change the default save location for files on my office PC three times in the past month. And I’m getting tired of doing the same thing over and over again. So PLEASE stop changing my preferences.

I have experienced lag on my much faster home machine/broadband connection as well. Not nearly as much as at the office, but enough so that I am not ready to start saving “everything” to the Cloud, despite my 40GB of available space. Maybe at some future point, when Sky/OneDrive syncs everything in the background (like Dropbox does) so the interaction is lag free, and is as simple as selecting any other folder in File Explorer.

But that’s not reality today. That is all.