Wasting Time Fixing Computers

An anonymous reader writes "Interesting experiment by Marshall Brain, where he tracked every time-wasting error, repair, annoyance on his home network for one month. He logs 11 hours and 20 minutes of crap, everything from driver problems to forced upgrades, spam overflows... you name it. Anyone on /. is experiencing the same thing. Is it going to get better or worse in 2004, and how much time are we all wasting?"

Comments

Re:In case you're wondering...

[Bugmaster]

Yeah. With Linux, it would take a full week, not some measly 11 hours. You know, seeing as setting the screen resolution alone takes 2 hours, and it gets worse from there...

Re:worse

[Bas_Wijnen]

the computers dont get viruses or bugs

Hahaha, and you think that is because of good system management? System management is about fixing or working around bugs, not about not having them.

If you don't encounter any bugs, then you probably don't do much on your machine. If you don't encounter any virus on a Windows machine, then that can partly be because of good system management (running a firewall, not using Outlook or ISS), but for the rest, which is not negligible, it is just luck.

If you were actually using the remote RPC stuff, then you would have been vulnerable for the worms exploiting it, even if you are a good system administrator (so you block ports you don't use).

In other words, your argument does not make sense.

I wonder how long a Linux network would take

[Overly Critical Guy]

Seeing as how it takes longer to install drivers, upgrade things, and set things up in general. Slashdotters LOVE to bitch about Microsoft yet again, yet disregard Linux completely in the equation, because to them, setting up Linux is a HOBBY, while setting up Windows is a HASSLE. It's called bias.

I remember the hell of just setting up APCI on my laptop until I realized that the reason the daemon kept crashing is that it just didn't work on my laptop. The evidence was when I tried two other distros and the same thing happened.

Meanwhile, Windows already works. :P

Re:Skewed results

[uncleFester]

but it's obvious you don't use windows a majority of the time....

you're right.. only ~8 hours/day as my work pc, term-ed into my unix boxen, and 2/3 the time of my home stuff reading mail and playing Battlefield 1942.

I've no earthly idea how i know my explorer drops trou every hour or so..

any more ASSumptions, einstein?

-'f

Re:How is it wasted time?

[IntlHarvester]

Yeah, I should mention that I also run normally as a Power User and I locked down IE. Those two steps saved my bacon more than once.

My opinion is that the "Windows mysteriously rots" phenomenon can almost entirely be traced back to the FAT filesystem, spyware, and crappy antivirus software.