Windows Can’t be Defended
July 10th, 2009Get Out Your Credit Card
I did something really dumb the other day. I installed Windows Defender. Have you tried this program? Microsoft released it to try to keep malware at bay. I’m not sure, but I think it may be the same basic thing Vista has, which drives users out of their minds.
Or not. It doesn’t say “Cancel or Allow.” But it does slow down the computer. For days, I’ve been suffering with slow website loading. This morning I finally realized I still had Windows Defender running, after installing real security software. So I dumped Defender, and now all is well. More or less. Some sites still stink. Northern Tool installed something called “liveperson,” which takes about a week to load, every time you go from one page to another. They ought to call it “deadwebsite.”
I Googled to find that Mac ad. Mac people are really annoying; they’re the vegetarians of the computer world. Often literally. But the commercials are great, and Microsoft deserves them. I have lots of software, but when I have a problem, it’s almost always caused by Office or Windows. Funny, how tiny startup companies can make software that works, while big, bloated Microsoft can’t.
“Bloated Microsoft.” Hmm…
These guys need to do a buddy movie.
I’m probably wrong, but my advice is, get rid of Windows Defender, be a man, and spend $30 on actual software made by people who care whether it works.
July 10th, 2009 at 10:17 AM
Huh. I’ll have to try turning off Windows Defender when I get home.
On the other hand, I’m Beta-testing Windows 7. And it seems fast to me.
July 10th, 2009 at 11:57 AM
Here’s how Microsoft development works. I know, because I worked there.
1. Take really smart, talented people and work them to death.
2. Plug those people into a massive bureaucracy and infrastructure system that is not dedicated to excellence, but rather to using components that your company has developed.
3. Build on existing systems, never stripping away or creating from scratch, so that you end up with an enormous code base.
4. Have literally dozens of teams working on different sub-components of each project, often replicating each others’ work, with massive redundancy.
5. Put in place aggressive timelines with ridiculous requirements about which tools must be used to accomplish a task.
6. Get it to “work,” without caring about performance.
7. Add caveats to your product packaging about system requirements, so that the company can blame the consumer for having an inadequate system (even if it meets the minimum requirements) rather than accept that they produce lousy products.
I will note that Windows 7 is about as close as “from scratch” as you’re going to get from Microsoft, as they do have people there who know that their other systems are just not at all efficient.
Fun story. When I worked there we would be sanctioned if we allowed auto update to run, because “upgrades” to XP would kill our ability to work on the network and with our apps.
July 10th, 2009 at 12:19 PM
I’m using the Windows 7 beta too, and on my “main” workstation at the office (and yes, it’s triple boot-able, sort of, so I can choose from Win7, XP Pro, and Ubuntu).
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It’s actually decent. For once, I even left the eye-candy crap running. Oddly enough (well, to me), I’ve found bits of it so useful that I haven’t used XP at all. I’m going to by buying upgrades to the home laptops, even (which are Vista boxes).
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…granted, it’s on a robust quad-core box with scads of RAM and a fast drive, so it would be pretty hard to slow the thing down. But if XP is any faster, I haven’t been able to tell (and I would be able to tell for anything more than marginal differences).
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I’m going to allow it into my previously XP-only domains. Which says something about it, I s’pose.
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July 10th, 2009 at 2:10 PM
All that MS and PC terminology is such gibberish. What a frustrating waste of time and money it must be.
July 10th, 2009 at 2:37 PM
I’d suggest running Spybot Search & Destory and Anti-Malware Bytes. You can add Super Anti-spyware if you want to run something else once in a while. All can be used for free and I haven’t had any malware fudge with me since I started using them. Except for the standard Windows claptrap, of course.
July 10th, 2009 at 2:53 PM
Having to pick between MS and Apple was like being presented with the choice between Obama and McCain.
July 10th, 2009 at 9:29 PM
The actor who plays “PC” in the Apple ads is John Hodgman. Hodgman is the author of “The Areas of My Expertise”, an encyclopedia of arcane knowledge such as “hobo names.”
July 11th, 2009 at 2:45 AM
I use Norton 360 on three machines (one Vista desktop and two XP notebooks) and pay for the annual updates.
A few years ago when it didn’t get rid of some belligerent crap on one of the notebooks I blogged about it superficially and to my surprise they (Symantic) found my internet complaint and they e-mailed me and had a customer service rep talk me through a free installation of their spyware software and helped me get things cleaned up.
Let’s face it Steve…compared to the old Apple II and Commadore and other computer crap we lived with back in the late 70’s and early 80’s today’s “IBM”/Intel/Microsoft PC’s are things of beauty and we should remember where we’re coming from when you can buy an incredibly powerful machine that will sit on one knee for $1000 today while remembering what you could get for $4000 in 1985 that took up an entire desktop.