Ordinary Gweilo

I have a theory about the humble PC, which is that it is still caught somewhere between being a toy for geeks and a consumer device. I speak as someone who has no wish to understand any more than is strictly necessary about operating system (or at least the ones that people won’t pay me to understand), and would like computers to “just ******* work”.

I thinks it’s clear that Microsoft are targeting the consumer market, leaving geeks to have fun with Unix. Successive releases of Windows have attempted to make things more user-friendly and minimise the amount of technical knowledge required to keep things running smoothly. Something went badly wrong with Windows ME (which is what was installed on this PC when I bought it), but Windows XP was a big improvement in terms of the stability of my PC. My brother (whom I suspect of being a bit of a geek) moans about XP not letting you do what you want to do, but on the whole I think I will trade some restrictions for greater stability.

However, what really bugs me is the way that almost every piece of software I install thinks that it is entitled to do its own thing, which includes adding an icon to my desktop and the ‘quick start’ button, and creating their own sub-folders in the ‘start’ menu. Before very long, everything is cluttered, I cannot find what I want, and I am forced to spend time tidying up.

The worst thing is that so many programs insist on starting up automatically when you boot the PC. This makes the PC slower to start up, degrades the performance thereafter, and can make the PC more unstable. If I want to start an application I am quite content to wait a few seconds rather than expecting an instant response! Yes, if you have the latest superfast processor then maybe you can run dozens of programs simultaneously withoiut noticing any difference, but equally you should be able to start up a new application very quickly, so you don’t need to have them running continuously.

These days programs aren’t content with the old (and relatively obvious) technique of adding themselves to the ‘startup’ folder, and even when this is empty you can find a long list of programs starting automatically. So I periodically run the System Configuration Utility (MSCONFIG.exe) and look through the list of startup programs there. Most are not required and can be removed. This is about as technical as I get.

My suspicion is that all this is partially about the different applications competing with each other. For example, I got very annoyed with Real Player because every time I inserted a CD it sprung into life and asked me what I wanted to do. I suppose that some people might regard that as helpful, but I certainly didn’t, and I eventually figured out how to stop it happening. I’ve got no problem with Real Player offering to do that automatically, but it should not happen without me requesting it – it’s like having a room full of five year-olds shouting “Me, Me, Me” when the teacher asks for a volunteer. [Since you ask, no, I don’t think I am cut out for a career in teaching.]

Some applications even ‘helpfully’ remain running after you think you have closed them. MSN Messenger is guilty of this, and it even pops up stupid messages telling me that some more junk mail has arrived in my Hotmail account. If I close an application I’d like it to stay closed and only restart when I want it!

My point is that I shouldn’t have to remove all this rubbish, or close a program twice before it really closes. If I was less technically aware, my PC could quickly become unstable and sluggish, and I would probably ending up buying a newer, faster, one when actually there is no need. Perhaps it is all a giant conspiracy by the computer industry to get us to spend more money, but I tend to believe that it’s actually stupidity and incompetence. Perhaps the next development in home computers will be to offers consumers a simple and reliable device that will do what they need cheaply and easily, and that this will be the undoing of Intel and Microsoft, but we may have to wait a few more years.