Computer problems
I’m in Philadelphia for the weekend, visiting my parents for the first time in about a year. Every time I come in I do a little bit of computer maintenance for them — basically just keeping their system running well. Last year I installed Windows XP, for example.
This year I’m sort of floored by the problems their system has. They have some weird “eAccelerator” spyware program installed, and Ad-Aware doesn’t seem to remove it. I can’t figure out how to delete it. Their system is completely out of date with regard to Windows updates — I went to Microsoft’s update site and found more than 25 “critical” updates for their system, including a number of extremely important security fixes. Why aren’t these more obvious, so regular computer users like my parents can install them (and understand what they’re installing)? And on top of that, I have to deal with popup ads in IE.
Why do people put up with this stuff? I’ve made sure that my parents know that my computer doesn’t have a risk of spyware, it rarely has security updates (and they’re easy and obvious to install), and I never see popup ads. Their next computer will almost certainly be a Mac. How does the rest of the Windows-using world cope with such an awful computing experience? No wonder so many people can’t stand computers.
Buzz Andersen Said,
July 31, 2003 @ 10:49 pm
I’m lucky–everyone in my family uses Macs. My mom (lucky devil!) has a G4 Cube! She installs her own software updates all the time, no big deal. Everybody’s happy!
Chris Hanson Said,
July 31, 2003 @ 11:44 pm
I simply tell my family that I won’t do tech support for anything that isn’t a Mac. Life is too short and everything else is just too crappy. Besides that, Mac users tend to need less support…
EJ Said,
August 1, 2003 @ 2:49 am
I helped move my sister from a PC to Mac this past weekend. Her situation was reminiscent of your parent’s. By the end, Word was crashing the entire computer and her sound refused to work. Since she was moving to a PC anyway, I stopped bothering trying to fix her problems, especially since the most likely solution would have been a reinstall. I do wonder why people put up with the crap that is PC. Perhaps they don’t know any better.
I saw that google’s latest version of their PC-only toolbar has pop-up blocking. Perhaps you might want to install that for your parents to at least eliminate that problem.
Brian Jepson Said,
August 1, 2003 @ 4:36 am
This looks promising: http://groups.google.com/groups?q=eAccelerator&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&selm=be45689e.0208271904.4d8d3448%40posting.google.com&rnum=3
But be sure to spend plenty of time with google groups before you implement this suggestion. A search for “eAcceleration” comes up with more results than a search for “eAccelerator”, though.
Brooks Moses Said,
August 2, 2003 @ 4:42 pm
Why do people put up with this stuff? I dunno, but I have some thoughts.
My first observation is that I run Windows, and I don’t have to put up with it. The recent RPC vulnerability was one of very few that was actually critical to my system, since I’m careful about what options I leave enabled and stuff. I could turn off pop-up ads at will, and I’m not at unreasonable risk of spyware because I’m careful what I install. (And, honestly, I’d think it would be just as possible to write a trojan spyware for Mac as Windows, wouldn’t it?) I would expect that, if you had a personal Windows machine, you’d have similar results. But, then, we’re fairly knowledgable computer users, and know how to deal with such things.
So, personally, I have quite non-awful computing experiences with Windows. And, I think most people with similar skills would have similar experiences.
On a different hand, though, are people like your parents. I’m not convinced that they (the class in general, not your parents in particular) are necessarily having what they’d consider to be an awful computing experience, either. The things that you list — being 25 system updates behind and having weird spyware on the system — are not something that a user of that skill-level would be likely to know about, and so chances are that they wouldn’t consider it awful at all until someone else points them out and explains the problems. The visible manifestation is either a bit of performance degradation (not “awful”, merely annoying), or a system that crashes and needs to be taken to someone knowledgable and thoroughly fixed (which is likely viewed as an “exceptional case” and thus something that people consider as different from the usual computing experience).
It occurs to me that there are probably things that work the other way too — things that you and I don’t find particularly annoying, but “average users” find really awful. Such as, for instance, web sites that are badly written and won’t load except on the latest IE. Or the fact that files from strange proprietary Windows-only programs won’t load on a Mac, or that their friend’s game won’t play on their computer because it’s a different operating system. Or, for that matter, the fact that different and new systems need one to learn new skillsets to work with them.
I don’t know whether this all wraps up into a solid point or not, really. Just an observation that “awful experience” is something that’s hard to measure from outside, and that what counts as a serious problem is certainly a matter of perspective.
I suspect, also, that a lot of people cope with not-particularly-great computing experiences because they believe that there isn’t a better option. And I suspect that, for many of them, it’s true — sure, Macs may avoid a lot of the core operating-system issues that Windows machines have, but those pale in comparison to the aggravation of things like trying to deal with MS Word’s autoformat when you don’t know how to make it stop or even enough to find the right place in the manual to find out. And things like that will always be there, on any system — the only solution for those sorts of aggravations is to never change away from something that one already understands.
And that, I suspect, is probably the real reason why people put up with such. It may be an awful mess, but it’s one that’s familiar, and they know how to use it to get basic stuff done most of the time, and they _know_ they know how to use it.
Ruby Said,
August 2, 2003 @ 10:35 pm
Wow, yeah, sounds like that computer might not be the best fit for your parents.
Ruby
Like Buzz, my family seems to be very happy with their macs! My sister has a purple imac; my mom a blue one; and my brother has some sort of other mac. Works the average fuzzie family…
Also, my roommate has at least 5 macs all over the apartment and we don’t seem to have any problems with them. (Well, except for the time I dropped his laptop! oops!) Plus, Safari is greatest thing after Google!
hee hee.. Hope you’re having a good time at home in PA
Ben Poole Said,
August 3, 2003 @ 2:39 pm
Over the past three weeks I have spent countless hours getting a Win98 PC up and running for my wife to work on. What a pile of cack… “plug and pray” is still kicking in identifying “unknown devices” every time we restart the machine (i.e. every few hours), and the registry has ongoing issues.
It’s just so nice to turn to my aged iMac (a rev D Bondi no less!) with Jaguar. Yum. Different class.
Marc Said,
August 4, 2003 @ 10:18 am
Windows makes it about as easy as humanly possible to install patches w/o invading your privacy. After you first install windows it will pop up a notification asking you what you want to do about automatic updates. You can choose to do nothing, automatically download them and have windows pop up a notification when they are ready to install, or even just install the things at a scheduled time. I picked the latter option on my parents computer since then it updates itself at some early hour in the morning and they don’t need to think about it. At least for me Windows XP is the greates thing for parental support ever. With the remote assistance functionality I can get a remote connection to my parents desktop to fix whatever problem is on it rather than have to try and walk though it on the phone.
As far as spyware goes if you run stuff from random sites you are just plane asking for having evil stuff done to your computer. If the mac didn’t have insignificant market share then spyware would be just as large of a problem there. Be careful encouraging people to switch to the Mac get too many and it won’t be such a nice place any more…
Notebook Said,
August 8, 2003 @ 10:07 pm
Kapow! It’s dead.
If you heard a crying scream from Seattle this afternoon, it was the dying breath of our Active Directory domain.
Dave Said,
October 2, 2003 @ 7:10 am
I was attacked by eAccelerator and Stopwatch this morning while trying to load Wav Explorer from a free-ware site. I have a program called PestPatrol on my computer that cleaned it up right away.
Dave