Monday, August 18, 2008

Babysitting laptops

PCs are so fecking demanding. I've got a few laptops at home ready for some training I'll be doing and every time I switch one of them on I'm assaulted by a bunch of popups telling me I need to update this or that, Windows Update, Java, Macafee, some other crapware installed with Dell. After half an hour of updates, I can finally get round to doing whatever I need to do, which I've forgotten about by now of course.

So how can this be solved? Here's some suggestions

Windows Update - OK, this is probably a necessary evil, although I'm dubious about some of the updates pushed my way. Are they all really necessary?

Macafee - I haven't run a scan for two weeks because the laptop hasn't been switched on at all, I'm not likely to have acquired a virus in that time am I?

Sun Java - Do you really have to keep bugging me to install the Google Toolbar? And what the feck has that got do with Java anyway?

Dell - Stop installing all this crap on your PCs. Offer an option of installing a clean OS, even if it costs a little more. The problem is that all that extra crap you install hits performance and half of it is badly written trash so people start to think Windows is crap and go off and buy a Mac, even though it's actually Dell that's the problem. The irony is that the thing that made PCs successful, open hardware meaning anybody can build them and install whatever they feel like, is the thing that may well kill them off, replaced by the closed Mac...

1 comment:

LJ said...

There are some programs (or scripts?) for removing the Cr*pWare from machines such as Dell - I know as it was in an article I read somewhere.

As for the rest I would hope there would be patches/registry hacks for those?