New Way To Grade Decay of Computer Installations

skojt writes: "I saw this link in Dr Dobb's Journal (the paper edition) about the behaviour of a slowly decaying computer installation. It refers to a Windows installation, but as the author writes, 'But there will shortly be ports to Linux, Mac OS X, and other Unices; we are confident these OSes are just as prone.'"

Comments

Real Player is a Great Example

[0xA]

I have this big time beef with Real One Player (free version). I make a point of cleaning my startup items out whenever some stupid thing like Real's Start Center gets in there. That is anoying enough but Real has taken it to a new level.

On my XP box Real One put "eventsvc.exe" in the run key of my registry, I removed it. Every time I run Real One it puts it back. This thing is even more anoying than the start center, it just sits in the background until another app steals one of it's file associations. It then pops up a little box saying "this app has stolen my media type". The box has two options, "OK" and "remind me later", there isn't even an X in the corner to close it, you have to use alt + F4. If you don't say OK and this stupid thing is running it will pester you again every 15 minutes or so. You have to kill the process and then remove it from the registry (or use msconfig).

This IMO is the worst kind of cruft. Maybe I want to use Winamp for MPEG 1 audio! Please fuck off!

This piece of junk just sits in the background sucking up a couple megs of ram and using some cpu time when it needs to check that nothing else is moving in on it's turff. The fact that I am playing WC3 when it decides to do this, isn't relevant, Real must protect thier position as the number one most anoying piece of shit in existence. God only know how many memory leaks and all round crappy code is contained in this thing.

Real guys, last time I checked it was still My Computer. Leave your bullshit at the door.