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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?"
I simply don't have the time. It's quite surprising too, how much antagonism I get from family members that I, who Knows Computer Stuff, won't come around for an evening to just fix a few little things. A third of the time it's a "little thing" that can be lived with, another third it's a little thing that can be fixed quickly, but the last third it's a little thing that requires much effort, much time, and occasionally a little money to fix. There's only so much Fixing Stuff I can get to do, and only so much 'training' people on the correct ways to use a computer and fix it themselves (yes thats the ideal solution, but it doesn't just take a 10 minute rundown to get that working in practice)
My sisters, my brother, my mother, stepfather, father, aunt, two uncles, a few cousins and about six friends all see me as "the computer guy" and call on me to fix things.
Do you people who know car mechanics intimately get the same kind of fixit requests from family? damn that'd shit me. Maybe I should go become an expert in astrophysics or some other shit my family don't do
But I think that time spent restoring a computer to its formerly working state isn't so much wasted as annoying. Because you're going to waste a lot more time if your computer isn't usable.
Seriously, the downtime plague has gotten better in the past few years. Even Microsoft software is more stable than in the past (gasp!), and switching my personal laptop to an iBook running OS X has made reboots a lot less frequent (although I still have to force quit an app once or twice a week, Apple doesn't go completely blameless here).
All in all, out of the 43,200 minutes in a month w/ 30 days, we're talking about a 1.6% rate of unavailabilty. And no doubt, that's unacceptable, but I bet as far as home computers go, that number is as good as it's ever been.
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How could it be classed as 'wasted'? Its a necessary fix. Would you class filling your car as wasted time, or making lunch as wasted time? I think the article is a bit redundant personally. Its just nullified my entire job by saying all I do is a waste of time.
And Linux isn't the answer to all our prayers. It will work 100% out of the box, only if you install it on supported hardware, otherwise its a few hours finding an obscure patch to make things work. I spent a good few days trying to coax FreeBSD into running UDMA modes on its IDE controllers only to find out its not supported with the controller on the board. That's not 'wasted' time though. It was investigation to find the problem was mine - my fault for buying a cheap board. The only things I'd class as wasted time would be waiting for a bus that never came or waiting for a render which you knew wasn't going to work.
Then you could consider doing something yourself. You probably found out before that MS isn't really the place to trust when it comes to putting the customer first. How about a conclusion: Use something else.
And if you take the time to do some thinking anyway, think deeper (perhaps with a bit of help from the philosophy section on gnu.org), and conclude that only free software can give you what you want. Unless there is some strange company that actually cares more for its customers than for money... No, I can't think of one either.
Using Outlook and IE makes me wonder if this fellow is one of those who thinks IE "is the internet". Hm.
Personally, I feel that a good bit of this waste and vulnerability is caused by Microsoft.
Uhm.. sure. The latest version of their operating system is stable enough for most things. Around 50% of explorer crashes on XP are due to misconfiguration or user error.
Microsoft could build a bullet-proof OS, solve the virus problem completely, etc. But it chooses not to do that and, at least for now, seems to be largely immune to liability for all of these problems.
So stop using admin logons for everyday things. Most of the problems with spyware, malware, etc will disappear.Would you check your email or do anything else that is not admin work on linux as root? Of course not. When you have administrative priveledges on NT you can do lots of nasty things to your computer without difficulty. This means that any applications you run can do the same, since they are run with your access priveledges.
About 10 years ago I had both the interest and skills to build a Linux installation from scratch. I built Alphas, Suns and piles of single- and multi CPU PCs just to experiment with them and then sell them off.
Now I'm too old. I get irritated by the glitches and bugs. These days I get annoyed even with kitchen-and-sink Linux distributions like Mandrake. Sure it installs cleanly and looks smooth but I still have to fiddle with it to get Flash or Real work with Mozilla and so on.
I just want things to work.
My next computer will be a Mac.
The owls are not what they seem
My dad the welder taught me not to let family take advantage. If you do something for a living it means you bill for your time. You might have a 'family rate' but you still bill. He does make exceptions but in general he has a an hourly rate he charges for welding. He has also paid me for any tech work I've done for him.
Ok, looking through the log there are a minimum of three computers. His computer, Mom's computer and the kids' computer.
Of the 11 hours and 20 minutes, he includes 30 minutes of a cable blackout. Now unless Bill Gates went over to the cable company and snipped some wires, that's hardly a Microsoft problem. It isn't a tv or light fixture problem if the electricity goes out, so I wouldn't call it a computer problem if the internet provider is down.
We're now down to 10:50:00.
He spent 5 minutes helping a friend with Word problems, 10:45:00.
That takes the time spent *per computer* down to 3:36 and a few seconds per month.
Of the remaining problems, a very small amount of user education can take care of a large chunk of the time. Let's start with Windows updates. 6 clicks automates this whole process and you get all the critical updates you need to stop the next worm. He devoted 1:20 minutes that he never should have to that problem. That takes the total time down to 9:25, or approx. 3:08 per computer. While this is a problem, the fix takes literally 10 seconds and from then on you spend no time keeping your computer up to date. It just happens automatically. I think this may even be turned on by default in XP now, but I could be wrong.
I've seen a lot of posts that didn't read the article and just started bashing MS and Windows. Of the remaining problems, a couple were from third party software. In fact, he even counts the time spent consoling his child when a game doesn't work as part of the computer problem time. While there are few things as sad as a Christmas toy that won't work on Christmas day, it simply isn't fair to allocate that time to the computer.
So we're down to about 3:05 per computer over the course of a month. This includes what is probably a one time event -- the 4 hours spent determining that motherboard drivers were needed and installing them. If this is a one time event, then the per computer time drops to 1:45 per month. Because this is such a limited time frame, it is unknown whether the average time spent per month is closer to 3 hours or 1 3/4 hours.
Yes, there are plenty of things wrong with Windows, Linux, OSX, and computer hardware and software in general. But this is not the article to use to get an accurate picture of how much time is wasted on poor design, bad programming, and out right errors.
Non-techs (composers, graphical artists, housewives, arts students,...) use Macs extensively and they seem to love the OS/computer. It's quite a contrast to the burning hatred with which most Windows users speak about their platform.
The owls are not what they seem
Many of these problems he describes seem to come from the use of IE where better alternatives exist.
And of course, we who are in the know about alternatives to Microsoft's products could holler and rant forever about our preferred alternatives. That would not keep Marshall Brain or anyone else of his fellow power users from wasting time as he has just documented.
The problem isnt just a debate of MS or alternatives, it is rather that a lot of people expect their computers and internet connections to function about as reliably as any other comparable appliances. And MS and all the others are failing miserably in that regard.
His remarks about having to wade through kilobytes of EULAs are spot-on. Nobody requires you to read and accept a one-sided document like that when you buy a new oil filter or new tires for your car, why should an equivalent fix for some utility software have to be radically different? Many of these exclusive-rights software are things that it doesn't make much sense to copy and distribute, I mean, is there anyone that even would care about warez-sites offering "printer driverz", considering that they're rather worthless without the actual printer?
Really, the state of computers today bear strong similarities to what cars were back in the early 20th century. The difficulties with reliability, the need for frequent maintenance, and the requirements of the operators were a lot bigger than they are today. A driver had to be a fairly competent mechanic as well; similarly, people using computers can still not get anywhere close to optimal use from them without the knowledge about how to fix the internals.
Thus, like many of the above posters note, we who know more about computers than our friends get requests from them to fix theirs, as the ones that don't know how to fix their computers ask someone they know that does. The point remains that all this need for fixing and maintenance is indicative of a more fundamental flaw.
It is time to try and move forward, from the present-day sorry state of affairs. Abandoning certain flawed designs would be a good place to begin.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
"how much time a average computer joe spends installing, configuring, tweaking, a linux distro"
Simple - 0 hours. Average Joes don't install Linux - they either give up, get a friend to help or they aren't average..
I do tech support for my extended family as well. Most of them (cousins, in-laws, friends of family, etc) offer to pay me when I spend some time fixing them up. I almost always refuse, but the fact that they recognize the value of my services is appreciated.
As for immediate family... parents, brother... nah, they get free tech support. Part of the reason I'm So Darn Smart is that my parents brought me up that way, and bought encyclopedias when I was young, and helped me with my homework and drove me to computer club and helped pay for college and and and and and and and....
I figure I could do 2 hours of tech support every day for the rest of my life and still not pay them back.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
Just for some background, I work in corporate IT, and generally end up doing things nobody else can do. So I spend a lot of time on the phone and internet with vendor support.
If you have a catch-all service like on-site, use it! Dont let them push the problem back at you.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
It all comes down to this: "What do you these computers do on your network?" If all you do is use it to access the internet and play video games, and are just a periphery to the network, then you won't have much downtime because you aren't asking very much of it. Now, if you're running IIS, hosting files for your floor (assuming you're in a dorm, by mention of roommate, if not then my mistake), running as a NAT and perhaps even an streaming music station, WHILE playing video games and surfing the internet, then that's a more notable thing. A month uptime with Win2K and all that crap I just listed is a very long time in my experience, and before you assert that I don't know how to make a simple or smart design, let me mention that I've had uptimes over one year on a 486/40MHz w/ 8MB RAM using linux 2.0.36, which ran Apache, was my NAT and stateful packet inspection firewall, ran ftp server, ran ssh server and acted as a streaming music server. There is hardly a windows box out there with a year of uptime, much less one that does what that little 486 did.
Now, I DO run WinXP Professional, and I like it for the most part, but I get uptimes of maybe 2 weeks before the memory leaks in explorer.exe get to be too much. A good system if you shut the computer off every night, like a workstation, but for major links in your network that would render large headaches if they fail and require long uptimes, like a router, then I would not recommend using windows.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
There are certain family members that I don't support anymore. Mostly because 'Could you take a quick look at my computer? The scanner isn't working' turns into a 8 hour tarbaby reinstall of windows 98 se because they can't POSSIBLY upgrade to anything newer RIGHT now with business being the way it is. This is the computer that you told them NOT to buy because, while it _is_ 5% faster and $100 cheaper than the computer you TOLD them to buy, it's made with crap components with non-existant drivers. (the fact that it also has three virus checkers, three 'system performance enhancers', and four pieces of hardware from companies that no longer exist notwithstanding.)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Repair #3 -- summary: Windows XP security updates -- time spent: 1 hour
Repair #4 -- summary: Another Windows XP security update -- time spent: 20 minutes
Repair #5 -- summary: Microsoft Outlook crashes about once a week, but cannot update it -- time spent (in December): 1 hour
Repair #9 -- summary: Random application crashes that we all experience -- time spent in a typical month recovering from them: 30 minutes
Repair #21 -- summary: Time Warner Internet blackout -- time spent: 30 minutes (blackout lasted 8 hours)So there are some other ones (like his PC-cilin problems, the CNET download manager, etc) which were really problems caused by neglecting his PC (rather than doing 'routine maintenence' and resolving issues before they become problems). But the case is, in the examples cited above, he 'spent' 3 hours and twenty minutes doing things which either are/ can be automated, or else werent really 'fixed' by him (like the blackout! was he out there helping Time Warner get things resolved? No? Then what exactly did he do during that half hour?)
Well, he made the page at Slashdot, so I guess his sensationalism worked. But if this guy were a consultant, I would accuse him of padding his bill, big time.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I run far more apps than the typical Mac OS X user, and I can guarantee that your father's Mac was not forced to do three or four updates/patches per day. Either one of you is lying or else it's an exaggeration to try to support a position.
I just checked my software update log, and I received a TOTAL of seven updates for the month through the Mac OS X software update system, the last one of which was on Dec. 19. If you want us to believe what you're saying about your father's system, show us the update log. But you won't do it, because that number of updates just don't exist.