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pants
My MacBook is the first Mac I've ever owned. I like it very much. Although every now and then it stops responding, or responds very very slowly, because it's doing something more important. My Windows machines do this too, and at least in their case I'm better equipped to figure out why they're ignoring me. For instance, with my Windows laptop, every time I wake it up, I have to fight a duel with Symantec's anti-virus speed-bump software - a duel which I always lose. I want to browse a web page, the anti-virus software wants to check for online updates - and it's always me who has to wait. This means there's little point in my laptop waking up in 30 seconds, because it might well be a couple more minutes before I'm allowed to do anything.
Which is why I'm planning to build a very special computer. It's going to be fast and have Windows XP on it (Vista is nothing but a cunning Microsoft trick. One which I don't intend to fall for). I'm going to keep it away from the Internet, so it's not doing to have any anti-virus software on it - so that should double its speed. Neither will it have all the dozens of programs which love to while away their time fetching themselves updates and indexing their data and getting ready in case you decide later you might want to use them. It will run only whatever I've explicitly decided to run. And given that every component of this machine will be ten times faster than the PC I owned in 1995, I hope that by employing these drastic measures, it will actually be slightly quicker in use. I'll let you know how that goes.
Symantec are particularly appalling when it comes to slowing down machines because they do all sorts of other numskulled or borderline crooked things too. For instance, they make software that won't uninstall correctly, so you're stuck with it. And when your subscription is up, you are taken to a website to renew that subscription, but unless you pay very close attention and read the small print, what you actually end up doing is buying a whole new suite of software (this catches my dad out every single time). And the Symantec software on my laptop keeps interrupting me to pop up a little dialogue telling me that there's a new version of its software I can download for free. The only way Symantec would give something away for free is if there's something seriously wrong with its current software and it's covering its behind, so I've tried to do as it says. But when you click on the link it offers, the next thing you see is a Symantec web-page telling you that you typed the URL wrong. Smooth.
Comments: 5
You've touched on one of my most wretched pet peeves. I can't bear how as the technology grows, programmers' interest in gumming it up grows in direct proportion, so we end up with computers that move at EXACTLY the same speed they moved at in 1995. I never ever download or buy anti-virus software for my home computer, because as I understand it, it can't protect you from determined viruses anyway.
And when Windows introduced the feature of the computer booting up really quickly instead of having you sit and wait and stare at the moving Windows logo, I thought it was stupid, because you end up sitting and waiting and staring at your desktop instead...while the thing boots up. What's the point?
Posted by: KatharineC on March 25, 2008 01:39 PM
I have avast! anti-virus software installed on my laptop - it now runs so much faster than when I had Symantec or McAfee installed. Not only does my IT bf swear by its effectiveness, it is also free to download. It automatically updates its virus database every day without slowing you down and only brings out a new version once a year. I hardly notice it!
Posted by: Yvonne on March 25, 2008 01:50 PM
There's a lovely little mac widget called iStat pro which tells you what's going on in your mac. I loaded it and found out that my battery life had halved and the machine temperature could cook an egg because a faulty backup software was trying continuously to run a backup. All fixed now, and, of course, not Apple's fault at all - just dodgy third party software.
Posted by: John A-W on March 25, 2008 02:38 PM
Oh I had to give up on my Mac and now use my pc almost exclusively - the Mac is there for artworking and photoes but for general writing and googling, I've been converted to a more speedy and far less frustrating approach ... though Macs do look very cool!
Posted by: sarah on March 26, 2008 09:54 AM
I switch pretty easily from Mac to PC, but one thing drives my insane: the keys you use to jump to the end of a line or select a word. There's a Mac version and a PC version and then a Microsoft Office on a Mac version that's sort of in the middle. They need to be instinctive so I can think about other things and not what my hands are doing, but I spend more time trying to move the cursor with the keyboard than every other niggle combined.
Posted by: Rob on March 26, 2008 10:01 AM