That's the question of the day: cruft or crap? Or, to be a bit less opaque, what sucks more when buying a new computer, all the cruft that it comes with, or all the crap remaining to be addressed before one arrives at a working system? I found myself pondering the question while configuring my wife's new computer.
She has always used hand-me-down machines, largely because I'm the hard-core gamer who needs all the performance he can get. Her idea of hard-core gaming is playing a round of Scrabble and Family Feud in the same night, which means she doesn't exactly need a real speed demon. But this time around I figured she had suffered long enough with my old laptop—we bought it back in the summer of 2001—so I bought her a spiffy new Dell Inspiron E1505 laptop instead.
And I have to say we got a lot of computer for a great price. I spec'ed it out with all the options I wanted a couple of weeks ago, but then when I went to order it the price had gone up by roughly $500. I called Dell, and I have to give them credit for doing the right thing: the sales creature with whom I dealt gave me the same price I had been given by the web site almost a week earlier. I placed the order by phone, and the system arrived at our door in less than two weeks.
It's not cutting edge, but it's pretty beefy. It's got a 1.8 GHz. Core Duo CPU, 2 GB of physical RAM, a 100 GB SATA 7,200 RPM hard drive, a 15.4" TrueLife LCD display, an ATI X1400 video system, SoundBlaster Audigy sound, and a four-year, top-tier warranty contract—all for under $2,000. I thought that was a pretty darned good deal, and it's why I jumped on the system when I saw the price. That's one nice laptop.
The one thing that remained for me to do was configure it.
And that's where the cruft comes into the picture. For those of you who need the term defined, it's the junk that accumulates over time and gunks up the works. In computer terms this refers to entries hanging around in the registry, long-forgotten configuration settings stored in various obscure files, the ton of desktop customizations that have accumulated, etc. Wikipedia has a decent entry on the subject. I've always preferred the term 'kipple' myself, but not everyone is a fan of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
But wait, I just said cruft is something that accumulates over time; so how could a new computer show up all crufty?! My friends, it's all thanks to the wonderful power of licensing agreements. My wife's brand new Dell laptop was so stuffed with cruft, all of which thought it had to pop up various windows and annoy the hell out of us to prove its utility, that it took me hours to remove even the topmost layer.
For example, when I first powered up the machine I was immediately confronted by the McAfee security suite, Norton Ghost, Dell's home message-manager thingy, the Google Desktop, AOL, MusicMatch Jukebox, and a couple of other applications I can't even remember. I am neither lying nor exaggerating when I tell you that the brand new laptop took longer to start up than the five-year-old machine my wife was using because of all the damned cruft. And far worse, it wasn't even usable because of all the damned registration/configuration/update dialogs clamoring for our attention!
I think what pissed me off the most was that every single one of those software parasites was convinced of its inalienable right to ask, nay, demand information and attention from me. The McAfee pop-up, for example, couldn't be dismissed, couldn't be cancelled, and generally couldn't be avoided. The only way I could get rid of it was to provide my name, address, email, etc., which I wasn't about to do. Worse, when I pulled up Task Manager and closed the process manually, something went haywire with the McAfee suite and brought the machine to its knees. I had to close all the McAfee processes manually before I could do a bloody thing with the system.
My second step—the first was to uninstall the rotten McAfee suite before it could regroup—was to cancel the Norton Ghost trial garbage and uninstall it. I have my own, older copy of Ghost that I'll be installing later, once the machine is ready for it. At least with that I could click a cancel button. I had to confirm no less than three times that I really did want to cancel, but at least it let me cancel the operation without signing up for something.
So here's the short summary: three hours later I had removed the McAfee suite, Norton Ghost, Google Desktop, AOL, and a half a dozen other crufty applications, which largely solved its slow startup. The machine ran like a new machine should: fast and with a minimum of hassle. But it's ridiculous that I should have to fight as hard as I did to remove all that cruft in the first place.
Wanting to get my wife up and running as quickly as possible, I installed Norton Internet Security 2006 (NIS2006). As much as it pains me to admit it, I run my own computer without anti-virus, anti-spyware, or anti-phishing software; it doesn't even have a software firewall. I know in this day and age that's practically reckless, but I don't use it for downloading or doing email, so I haven't had a problem yet with that approach. With my wife, though, I don't have that option.
And don't take that to mean she's stupid, not by a long shot. No, it's that malware and spam have gotten crafty enough to fool her every once and a while—heck, I've been fooled once or twice, and I do this stuff for a living—and once is enough to screw the pooch completely in this day and age. Her computer needs to be safe, which means having some kind of security suite installed. Though the 2004 and 2005 editions of the product sucked, NIS2006 seems much better, so that's what I used.
Unfortunately, I then ran into the update nightmare from hell. Windows XP wanted to apply the 37 updates it found while Symantec's LiveUpdate engine was trying to download and install the 19 updates it found for NIS2006. The process would have been amusing were it not so painful. Apparently, when one is updating itself the other cannot, and the only reason I know this is because the two updaters kept failing and retrying and failing and retrying, each time screwing the other one just long enough to prevent anything useful from happening.
Ultimately, I was able to disable LiveUpdate, update Windows XP, re-enable LiveUpdate, and finally update NIS2006, but it was another two hours of downloading and applying updates—to say nothing of the eight reboots required along the way—before Windows XP and the security suite were both good to go. That's bloody ridiculous. It shouldn't be this damned hard in the year 2006 to install a simple piece of software and update it. Sheesh.
But that's not the real crap that darkened my doorstep. In fact, it's only the prelude to the real crap that darkened my doorstep. The real crap, as is so often the case, was the digital rights management (DRM) garbage protecting my wife's Family Feud game. It was supposed to be simple: run the game installer, enter your key, and it will be activated. The problem is that it doesn't work, though I guess it's also a problem that the company's support department can do nothing more than paste the same boilerplate text in response to every support request.
My wife doesn't play games a lot, but she does have a handful that matter to her. And though it probably wouldn't mean all that much to her if I couldn't get a game working, it matters to me; it's her new machine, after all, and it should be a pleasure in life, not a burden. But after two hours invested trying to get the game to work I gave up.
I thought I found the problem relatively early in the process, but nothing I did helped. It was when I looked at the NIS2006 event log that I found the activation URL being blocked by the privacy manager. As soon as I saw this, I figured that the security suite was blocking the game from activation; all I should have to do is disable the blocking, and it should work just fine. But that wasn't the case.
I disabled the privacy manager, disabled the firewall, disabled the anti-virus, heck, I disabled the whole bloody suite. I even went so far, in my desperation, as to uninstall NIS2006 completely and wipe every trace of it from the registry and hard drive! I added the game authentication site as a trusted site in IE, I turned off content blocking, popup blocking, and dropped the browser security levels to nothing, but I could not get that rotten thing to authenticate.
So like I said, I gave up. Nothing I did worked, so I did what I always do when crappy DRM screws me, the legal user: I downloaded a crack. It took me all of two minutes to find a pirated copy of the game on-line, and it took another thirty seconds to find a no-authentication crack and download it. After two hours of fighting to make a legitimately purchased piece of software work, I downloaded a crack that works great.
Allow me to quote another of Phil's Laws: DRM does nothing to stop piracy whatsoever but does manage to screw the paying customer. Were I inclined to support piracy, I could post you the links here to two different torrent indexing sites that have the full game available for download. Or I could post the links to the three different places I found working cracks. But I don't support piracy, so I won't.
The key thing to recognize is that any pirate can go download the game, download the crack, and be playing it within five minutes or so, whereas the paying customer spends hours on the problem (and days going back and forth with technical support) and can't get resolution. Gee, that DRM stuff sure is doing a bang-up job, isn't it?
The truly criminal part to this sad episode is that I'm now the criminal! Thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA), signed into law by the greatest jackass ever to inhabit the oval office (viz., Clinton), what I did was a criminal act. It's illegal for me to download that crack, and it's illegal for me to use it. What's more, it's probably illegal for me to talk about it, though I'm not so sure about that. The bottom line, however, is that I'm a criminal for doing the only thing I can to use a product I legitimately purchased. Isn't that just lovely?
I'll step off the DRM soapbox now and talk about the last major hurdle: transferring settings and software. I've only scratched the surface really, insofar as I'm sure we'll find dozens of programs that have to be installed on the new system, but even the most basic items were painful. It's pathetic that it's so hard to configure a new machine, but the fact remains nevertheless.
The very simplest thing I tried to do was change her browser home page for her and failed miserably. Oh, Internet Explorer would let me set it, but it wouldn't "stick". I tried changing it using the control panel, but that fared no better. I even went so far as to edit the entries in the Windows registry by hand, but that didn't work either.
Eventually I found the culprit: NIS2006 has a "home page protection" feature. It was supposed to be notifying me of the change and giving me options, but it wasn't. No matter how I configure it, it will silently—thankfully it does make a note in the log, or I would never have found it without any visible prompt—block the change and leave the old value in place. That took me far too long to find and fix.
But the worst part was the file and settings transfer wizard. That's a tool provided by Microsoft, which is designed to make it simple for the average user to transfer all his customizations from an old machine to a new machine. I'll grant that the tool is simple to use; even the novice should be able to figure it out. My only substantive complaint is that it doesn't work.
We told it to transfer all kinds of settings, but the only thing that transferred were her network drive mappings. Gee, that was helpful. It didn't transfer her wallpaper, her desktop icons, other shell customizations, file types, or pretty much any of the other things we said we wanted it to transfer. Maybe one of these days I'll be able to lower my expectations to the point where Microsoft software seems great, but I haven't hit rock bottom yet. Honestly, what's the point of having a files and settings transfer wizard if it doesn't transfer any settings?! Sheesh.
Finally, transferring her data from Outlook was an adventure. She doesn't exactly have a monstrous personal folder file, but it took something like twenty minutes to export it from her old machine. It imported much more quickly into the new laptop, but I was disappointed to see it doesn't include email account settings. Maybe those were supposed to be handled by the files and settings transfer wizard? I don't know. What I do know is that it's more typical, Microsoftian stupidity to transfer all her mail without transferring all the accounts too (sigh).
Well, after roughly ten hours of work, I managed to remove enough of the cruft and fight through enough of the crap for my wife to sit down and actually start using her computer. I was originally quite disappointed with her low level of enthusiasm when it arrived. After hearing her complaints about the old laptop for the last year, I thought she would be at least somewhat excited when the new laptop arrived, but that wasn't the case. She greeted its arrival with all the zeal our dogs reserve for bath day.
But then last night, after she had been using the machine for a couple of hours, she looked at me with a sheepish smile and said "I have a really spiffy new laptop, don't I?" I could tell that she was enjoying it, and I could see she appreciated how much nicer a machine it is. I've since caught her smiling at how light it is to carry around the house and how fast it opens her documents. The happiness I have seen makes the effort and the money worth while, even though I shouldn't have to jump through such ridiculous damned hoops in the first place.
Maybe in the future I'll just wipe the drive completely. I didn't want to do that because I didn't want to have to hunt for drivers and all that jazz. I was hoping the machine would show up ready for use. But I guess cruft and crap come first these days ahead of silly little things like, oh, being able to boot the system and run useful applications. How pathetic. So now I have reported, dear reader, and it's time for you to decide: what sucks more, the cruft or the crap?
07/19/2006