Brand New Crap

So what the hell is up with all these PC manufacturers squeezing as much crap (and crap is the best way to describe it) as they can on – what are supposed to be – brand new computer systems? Whatever happened to the days where a purchased computer was basically no more than the hardware and an operating system? I, for one, liked it that way. You bought your computer and populated it – on your own – with software that you either needed or wanted. It was great because you knew exactly what was on the machine at all times and were usually at least somewhat aware of any interdependencies between different pieces of software. But I guess those days are long gone…

Now for me, at least, this really isn’t an issue. I build my own personal computers and can easily just install an operating system to get me started. However, when the inevitability of working on (or helping upgrade) a friend’s or family member’s PC pops up, I need to deal with the crap that these manufacturers seem to think people just can’t live without. And, from the looks of what’s always on these boxes, the average person just can’t live without hundreds (slight exaggeration) of very unstable demo versions of programs that they can, for a price, upgrade to the just as unstable full version. I mean what are we? Lemmings?

I suppose the reason that I have decided to write about this is because I have basically spent a large majority of the last three days setting up a brand new desktop (HP Pavilion a1612n) and notebook (Lenovo 3000) PC for my parents. You see my parents are from a time where computers were very large, very complicated pieces of machinery usually housed in some secret governmental location that required a team of highly educated scientists to derive the product of two hexadecimal numbers – and the best they could get was an approximation due to the limited significant digits available. To them (my parents, that is…), this is still the case. They just haven’t come around to realizing that the home PCs of today are designed in an effort to be usable by pretty much idiots – otherwise known as typical Americans. I don’t know … but I can guarantee that the crap that is being pre-loaded with these machines sure isn’t helping this matter.

As an example of the madness, check this out… My father is really into the whole mp3 sharing scene – and I mean really into it! (Don’t worry, he only shares public domain songs – wouldn’t want the RIAA on his ass…) In fact all he ever does on his computer is partake in some sort of never-ending quest to find pretty much every song ever released on any media (assuming, of course, that it was a song from the 50’s or 60’s). He’s been able to acquire a rather astounding number of these little treasures in the last 6 years with his old computer (a 2000 model Compaq Presario) however that machine was so screwed up that it was becoming damn near impossible to use. The solution – buy a new computer! This we did – along with a notebook for my mother to play her games on in the living room…

Okay, so we (my parents and I) headed out and purchased basically the cheapest computer that we could find that I thought would be sufficient to keep my parents happy for as long as possible. We chose the HP Pavilion a1612n. It’s decent – an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual processor with more bells and whistles then my folks will ever need. The main thing was that it came with a 19” LCD monitor and the old Compaq monitor that they had was basically burned out. We purchased the computer and brought it home. It was then that I started setting the thing up for my dad which basically meant removing all the unneeded (and completely unwanted) software from the machine and transferring the literally thousands of mp3’s from the old box to the new one. No problem. Finding all of the mp3’s in the myriad of folders and subfolders that my father had managed to use over the last 6 years was a challenge; however the files were found and transferred. Now the resistance to change that is my father needed to be dealt with. My job then became making this new machine act exactly (well, as close to exact as I could get) as the old one did. This created a bit of a problem…

For the last 6 years, my father had been using Adaptec’s Easy CD Creator 4.x for burning his mp3’s to audio CDs. He wanted to continue using this software (software that we still had the source CD for) on his new machine. Unfortunately, this software doesn’t even install on an XP-based system. No problem … we headed out again in an effort to find a version of the same software that would work on the new system and purchased roxio’s Easy CD & DVD Burning software. (There was a much fancier version that included a bunch of features that would never be used for something like $80 but we decided to purchase the Easy CD & DVD Burning package and save ourselves $50…) I figured that this software should do the trick and would be the closest to the old Adeptec software that my father was comfortable with. Cool … problem solved … or so I thought…

After getting the software home and installed, we quickly ran into a bit of an issue where “no compatible drives were found”. Great! Now I needed to figure out why this software wasn’t working… It took me somewhere on the order of 6 hours or so to finally figure out the maze that was the roxio support webpage and successfully find the patch required to get this software to play nice with the drives. The worst part was that it wasn’t even a patch included on the list of patches for the software we were attempting to fix – it was a patch that I located in the “Ask RoxAnn” knowledgebase. I suppose roxio can make more money by hiding the actual patches that work – frustration is a great way to get your customers to shell out more money for software they don’t actually need; but it sure seems to me like it would be better for the consumer if good support was given on software that they were actually planning on using…

But I digress. This issue, although frustrating as hell, isn’t really the main issue I wanted to address. Although the Easy CD & DVD Burning software was a pain; it did not come pre-installed on the machine. We actually purchased that little problem… There were, however, several other programs already on the machine that would burn audio CDs – just not exactly the way my dad was used to. And as I have said, when he gets a procedure figured out that works for him, he’s very unwilling to change it. I need to get back to my main topic and bitch and moan some about all this extra crap…

Removing these little jewels basically becomes a full time job for a few days. For the desktop system, I guess it’s not really that complicated – just time consuming… However the notebook PC that was also purchased was a bit more complicated. There was so much crap on that machine (mostly security based “enhancements”) that removing unneeded stuff gets a bit tricky. I mean the way the computer came configured required two passwords to just log on. How stupid is that? Not only that, but I seriously doubt that my parent’s computer is going to be the target of any complicated hacking scheme. I mean why do my parents need to set up extensive encryption techniques in order to play silly little casino games (no real money involved)? It’s not every laptop that contains important, top-secret corporate information. Some of them are just toy boxes.

It seems to me that these computer manufacturers might want to consider creating computers that come pre-installed with nothing more than the operating system. Not everybody has thousands of digital pictures and videos that they want to turn into Hollywood-quality movies that can bore even the dullest person to death (I know … I’ve made a few…). Some people just want to play games (or collect mp3’s…). It’d be nice if these computers also came with a button that can be selected to remove all the unnecessary crap. That sure would make my life easier…

bis später,

Coriolis