December 02, 2006
NOT TODAY, NOT TOMORROW, BUT SOON
AND FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE
The PC I work on at home is going on 7 years old. Which, you know, is ancient by current standards.
It's slow as molasses. Every program takes minutes to load - yes, minutes. Startup alone is a 15-minute process. I just turn it on and walk away until it's ready to catch up to me.
About a year after I bought it, the operating system - Windows Millennium - went to hell. The only thing I could raise was the Blue Screen of Death. I called Microsoft and Gateway for tech support and was told I'd have to reformat the hard drive. So I did. They walked me through it over the phone. It was a total disaster.
A friend of mine who owned a computer installation company offered to come over and load Windows XP instead. "Millennium is a turd," he told me.
So he loaded XP. Didn't charge me a dime. Thing ran great for the better part of 6 years.
That was until about three months ago, when I started getting a screen on my opening page that said "This copy of Windows is not genuine." The message started appearing after Microsoft pushed through an update onto my system.
When you click through, it tells you that it will cost $100 to rectify the problem.
Yes, that's right. They waited 6 years to tell me that my system violates copyright. And all they want is 100 sheckels. Immediately.
I have to click through this warning every time I start the computer. Then once I start the computer, I have to click through a window that asks if I want to "resolve now" or "resolve later." I click resolve later and then it makes me wait five seconds.
The latest bit of fun: It's started to mess with my McAfee security software. I get little messages from them in the corner of my screen a few dozen times an hour telling me that my computer's safety cannot be verified and that security updates cannot be installed.
Oh, and Microsoft keeps trying to send me updates for the system. Updates, mind you, that cannot be loaded because my system isn't "genuine." They just sit there in computer limbo, taking up space on my hard-drive.
Which is where I am right now.
Now, I don't want to be a skeptic. I really don't. I'd like to think that Microsoft isn't shaking the trees for money the year before they introduce their Vista operating system. See, that would mean they were snookering lots of people to buy an old system right before it became obsolete. That would be a bad public relations move, wouldn't you think?
And wouldn't it be bad customer relations to assume that someone purposefully and illegally loaded counterfeit software when, in fact, they had no control over that?
And then wouldn't it be a liability to the image of the company to interfere with the security of that system just for the sake of shaking 100 bucks from someone's wallet? Wouldn't that be seen as a type of extortion?
It's enough to make you not want to reward that type of behavior with additional purchases. Or at least try this workaround hack.
Then I read this post. I have no idea who this guy is, but I saw the post at Digg. Apparently this Thomas Hawk is known for his love of PCs and Windows.
Of note was this particular passage in the post:
It just works. It took about 48 hours of getting used to but once my little introductory awkward phasewas over it just works so much better. It springs to life immediately when I open it.
That sounds like what I want. I just want my computer to work. I don't want a thousand other programs to run simultaneously that I have no control over. I just want my computer to work without being browbeaten for more money. I want a computer that doesn't make me work harder than it works.
So I've made a decision: the next computer I buy will be an Apple. Yes, that will make life messy. Yes, it will take some rethinking on my part.
But if the iPod Nano I have and enjoy has taught me anything: it's that Apple is a company that likes to make a lot of money through good, efficient, user-friendly design, not through bald-faced shakedown methods.
That, my friends, I can live without.