Thursday, May 23, 2013

De-smogged.

When I was younger, it was not uncommon to peer under the hood of some piece of mid-'70s Detroit iron and see severed-'n'-plugged vacuum lines everywhere, the result of a teenager's attempt at "de-smogging" the car to try and awaken all the latent horsepower that must have been lurking in there somewhere.

I feel the same way about buying a Windows desktop machine from one of the major manufacturers today. The first thing I have to do is get all the bloatware out from under the hood. There's nothing more annoying than being in the middle of slaying dragons or shooting tangos and having the screen drop to the desktop with an urgent window letting you know that your Free Trial Subscription to Super Coupon Value Saver is about to expire. The downside of the All New!® Windows 8 interface is that I'm having the devil's own time finding where all this stuff connects, and feeling like I'm just clipping vacuum lines and threading sheet metal screws into the severed ends.

28 comments:

Jay Dee said...

I've seen comments to the effect of buy a copy of 8 and give it to someone you hate.

Anonymous said...

MS licensing permits downgrades, so find a non-oem install source for windows 7 and do a clean install.

The oem's load up so much BS and possibly alter things in the OS you don't want molested, but the microsoft direct win7 install base is squeaky clean.

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

If you have a downgrade key for Windows 7, I have a retail disk you can use.

Anonymous said...

Between you and Fred (on everything) I just bought a reconditioned Dell Windows 7 machine.
Thanks for all the warnings. And I wanted a real serial port for the ham radio interface.

Terry
Fla.

Andrew S. said...

I recommend that everybody build their own PCs. It's literally as simple as plugging in connectors. The only too required is a screwdriver, and they're working to eliminate even that. Newegg.com has a fantastic video series on building your own rig, a little over an hour long where they explain the computer's components and terms and build two PCs in front of you. The same site also sells diy part bundles that save you money. You get to avoid sales tax, customize performance to your needs, save a ton of money compared to a factory built pc, and you avoid all that bloatware. I got started by adding a video card to my ancient internet machine, and was blown away by just how easy it is. I'll never buy a prebuilt desktop again.

Tam said...

Andrew S.,

Thank you. I built my first PC in 1991.

Aesop said...

Tam,

I think that was a typo.
If you're getting all the annoying reptilian crap out of the nether regions of the OS, what I think you meant to type was that it's
been De-Smauged.

Tam said...

(When I was really into gaming, I always built my own boxes. These days I just use the computer for work and occasional light WoW or CoD/MoH. I want to buy a box and plug it in. I should have bought a Mac, but I was briefly overcome with the idea of buying something I could upgrade and keep running for ten years like my last desktop box.)

Tam said...

Fuzzy Curmudgeon,

"If you have a downgrade key for Windows 7, I have a retail disk you can use."

Nah. It's not that bad; just unfamiliar. I've about got it figured out; I'm not going to shriek like a little girl and run behind the skirts of the previous version. ;)

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

MS workstation-class operating systems are like Star Trek movies, every other one is worthless.

Windows 8 is yet another MS failure in the grand tradition of Windows ME and Windows Vista. So I don't really consider downgrading to be all that bad :)

On the other hand, I had to install a development copy of Windows 8 through Remote Desktop on a virtual machine in our colo, 600 miles from where I normally sit and work. Much cursing and gnashing of teeth ensued before I finished and handed it over to our web guy, with the comment that if it broke, I wasn't going to fix it :)

Windy Wilson said...

The really terrible thing about Windows any version is in Task Manager where all those incomprehensible programs are all running at the same time, and there's no way to tell which one is reinstalling Free Trial Subscription to Super Value Saver every @#$%^&* time you boot up.

As for cars and smog equipment, I lived through the 70's. The biggest offenders for rerouting spaghetti tubing were the auto mechanics who'd been working on cars for 30 years and just knew that they could get the car back to running smoothly and with great gas mileage if this vacuum thingie here didn't actuate this other thingie that shouldn't be moving.

Kristophr said...

http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-10418439-285/running-world-of-warcraft-in-ubuntu-linux/

Heh.

Always go full Nerd-Tard.

Sebastian said...

I'm big on always doing a fresh install. It amazes me how many PC vendors ship their machines in a configuration that is so sadistic, it defies belief.

RevGreg said...

There was a time back in the mid-80s when my 1964 Impala had a screw in the rubber hose that went from the main brake line to the rear axle (had a new exhaust installed and they mounted it touching the hose and it burned through, drove with fronts only for a week) and at the same time my Apple ][+ had wires jumpered betwixt the legs of various ICs on the board to allow for some interesting display options. I miss those days!

Brad said...

There is a freeware program called PC Decrapifier that will remove most of that but I don't know if it works on Windows 8.

Ian Argent said...

I can't say what their crapware state is since they were fully assimilated by Dell; but when I bought the current machine, I went with Alienware because they were going to give me a (fairly - there was some non-autorun software to control some aesthetic hardware options) OEM Windows install, a fairly decent selection of parts in the build, they were going to build it for me so I didn't have to spend a weekend swearing, cussing, and bleeding superficially, and give me a single point-of-contact for a warranty; all for a premium over the same collection of parts at Newegg of less than $HOURLY_RATE$ x $TIME_SPENT_CUSSING$. It appears Falcon Northwest is still in business as well. You can also take a look at Dell's business lines; they tend not to crap those up.
These days, I'd rather spend the time with my family - I'll leave wrestling with a screwdriver and barking my knuckles on sharp edges to someone else.

Nick Carter said...

msconfig is still your friend, even in windows 8.

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

"$HOURLY_RATE$ x $TIME_SPENT_CUSSING$"

I LOL'ed. And I get paid fairly big money for that kind of thing. The product of those two variables gets kind of logarithmic around our shop from time to time.

CGHill said...

Last two desktop boxes, I had custom-built: the builders don't like that crap any better than you or I do.

Jeffro said...

So what't the A.I.R. pump equivalent in Winders?

og said...

You have accurately described most of my job- taking obtuse and heavily embedded OS feabugs and writing patches around them so that people can- you know- get work done. Half of the time I feel like Harry Tuttle and the other half of the time I wish I could find Harry Tuttle

shovelDriver said...

So much crying on the intertubes about an O/S that is faster and more secure. Sure, the new interface is a piece of teenage cellphone/tablet crap, but . . . if you use on one of those, it works. Otherwise disable the Metro GUI.

About all that crapware, extract your install key out of the registry or read it off the certificate on the case. Grab a download of MS's ISO and make your own DVD. Boot to DVD, wipe and install a clean no trialware platform.

It ain't rocket science. At least, not any more.

og said...

....except that most people that will be using the platform are housewives and insurance salesmen who have zero clue what ms's ISO is.

Tam said...

Og,

W.

LonelyMachines said...

Hey, there's always Linux...

Anonymous said...

Two years ago I bought the ACER laptop that I'm using at this moment, I spent over five hours the first day I had it uninstalling all of the bloatware and "free" trial software and subscription packages from the Win7 operating system that came with the computer. The next day I installed Ubuntu Linux 11.04 as an alternate OS. Now the only time I boot into the Windows OS is to keep current on the updates and upgrades.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said "Fred(on everything)"!
Fred says, "Without Men, Civilization would last until the oil needed changing." W.

Tam said...

You really don't have any idea how fucking retarded that sounds, do you?

*pats Annoymouse's little pointy head*

Run back off and play, now. Grownups are talking here.