How to Lift a Rock and Hit Your Own Toes (Hard)

Again today is a fine Saturday, and again, I have nothing much to do. My little projects for the day will be to clean up my room (wipe the table, keyboard, desk lamp, and cabinets), move my new PC into place, and install back my favourite Linux distro. The main reason for the last project will be clarified in detail shortly.

Clarification: The mug on the table contains Chinese tea, not beer (yet), and I am puzzled by the clarity of this picture: It looks too nice to be from my V3i.

While waiting all the live-updates to update themselves, I have been pondering upon this question: Will sane, educated, and presumably rational persons lift heavy, jaggeds rocks to hit their own toes? As metaphorical as this thinking goes, I have found a solid example these days when dealing with Microsoft Windows. I will take three issues of MS Windows as examples: overbloated registry, nasty spyware/adware, and rampant viruses.

Due to brain-dead designs, MS Windows (from 95 until XP SP2) stores all configuration information in a messy dumping ground called Registry. It is common to have registry file as large as hundred of megabytes for a heavily used machine (e.g. office machine). Since this file is growing because of buggy uninstall programs and/or continuous installation of new programs. Windows has to spend more and more time to parse this ever growing monster. As a direct consequence, performance of the machine is severely degraded (ah, this time Intel will approach and tell you Moore's law. Honey, time to upgrade!! Nice plot, right?). To address this issue, we need a tool to clean up the registry (highly impractical to clean up manually) with some sort of registry cleaner, say Registry Mechanic which costs AUD$49.95 (roughly USD$40) per seat. Fine, you dow out the dough and take the hit. Wait, don't sigh your relief yet, this is just the beginning.

Now, we have spyware/adware which typically are web-based programs that exploit vulnerabilities on crappy web browser (read: IE) and install nasty small programs into our PCs. Want to resolve this? Sure, I have found Ad-Aware from Lavasoft to be reasonably effective. The price tag for this starts at US$ 26.95. The good news now is we are kind of protected while surfing the net, the bad news is we are only kind of protected, not totally protected. No program in this world can give you 100% guarantee on its effectiveness, so we will need two programs from different vendors to increase the coverage. Again this will be USD$30-$50 of set back on our budget. The same rhetorics go to viruses on Windows platform and the anti-virus software associate with that.

The latest trend involves ubiquety of broadband access. The bright side is proliferation of information, but this also literally opens up most household computers to the world. Usually these computer owners aren't tech savvy and most have basic amount of IT knowledge. Understandably the OS of choice will be MS Windows, but the track record of Windows has been sordid. Given it is unreliable out of the box, solution? Personal firewalls with similar lines as the previous items. Pay up to get this issue alleviated (note, it indeed is alleviated, not eliminated)

After wrestling with these utilities for these days, I just feel like I have lifted a rock (the purchase of Windows) and hit my own toes hard (has been wasting time and energy to keep track of and clean the registry, viruses, firewall, etc.) The simple solution will be just reformat the hard drive and install Linux, however in order to play games that are only available on Windows, I have taken a compromise and allow my system to dual boot: my default system is Linux, but if I have a specific need that demands Windows, I will boot into Windows. Until now this is what I can do to reduce my headaches and regain some sanity. Isn't that a computer is a productivity tool to start with?

So Dear Reader, have you hit your toes today? (TM) (R)