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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?"
Basically, once my linux systems are up and running, I spend 0 minuts fixing it and about 5 minutes/week upgrading it.
because many computer users i know simply don't care the least about keeping their machine clean. Why use another browser than IE which their so used to (they had a crash course of course). Outlook and word is all they use (perhaps even acrobat reader) and preferably as little as possible.
I've spent countless hours removing blaster and the likes, removing spyware and viruses and trying people to get to use Moz Firebird or Opera.
Of course, a month later they call me again with *exactly* the same problems.
Alas for most people a computer is like a coffee machine it just has to fullfill its purpose. Companies can release all the fixes they want, it won't make a difference for a large part. My father for example has this Dell Laptop 2.4ghz P4 cpu. Runs on win98 (!) and office97 (no updates of course) because there's no money for upgrades or m$'s stupid licensing. The IT staff at his place doesnt have a clue bout spyware and the likes ('but we have a firewall') or vulnerabilities and i guess they wont ever care in this life.
It's only gonna get messier i'm afraid.
Thanks to Microsoft for exercising their right to innovate browsing
Look at some of the numbers:
:D
Repair #1 -- summary: Mom's printer driver -- time spent: 1 hour
Repair #6 -- summary: Had to load motherboard-specific XP drivers on kids' machine -- time spent: 4 hours
Repair #21 -- summary: Time Warner Internet blackout -- time spent: 30 minutes (blackout lasted 8 hours)
It should be noted that not all of the time offs are due to Windows XP, as certain other anti-MS posters will attest, but but factors out of the users' control and also the users' stupidity. I would like to see how much time one spends every months getting Linux to function.
A blog like any other.
My respons? Either of:
"No problem, let me have a look"
"Sorry, I am a Linux developer"
This tip is GPL:ed ;-)
I manage 9 Dell servers and have the "Gold" 4 hour on site service on all of them. It took 2 days of being on hold for over 4 hours to get a service tech to my facility. They shipped a new MB, new backplane and new PCI Riser cards (no processor, no system ram, no power transformers for the processor, no RAID ram. The technician worked on the machine and spent a little over 1 hour on the phone with tech support himself. He installed everything and nothing, machine is still dead. So now they're sending more parts and another tech to fix the problem again. Hopefully this time they will bring a whole machine with them! Monday morning will decide if I continue to buy Dell hardware.
AF-Design, web development.
...that we're definitely wasting time *every* day due to the current state of Microsoft Windows desktop software.
Crashes, fixes, updates, patches, security updates, spam (due to insecure Outlook email clients, etc.) and the like are a daily issue for Microsoft Windows users. In fact - no lie - I just rebooted my machine due to Windows XP "detecting and recovering from a device error". All I was doing was using my computer.... (sigh). BTW - if XP did "detect and recover" from it, why did I have to reboot? That's not "recovery", that's "hanging on by a thread, and allowing me to reboot". (sigh, again).
It'll only get worse for Microsoft Windows users.
Solutions? A) Switch to a Mac - my mother hasn't crashed her Mac since she got it, two years ago. B) Switch to command-mode - it is incredibly hard to crash a server these days from the command-prompt. (I guess it's incredibly hard to do any *actual work* from the command mode, if all you've ever used was a GUI.) For us Unix stalwarts, it's much much much faster than using a GUI. C) Switch to another O/S (i.e. Linux). Since Microsoft illegally killed all it's O/S competitors, that leaves just a couple. Go to eBay and pickup an old copy of DR-DOS, or DeskView, OS/2 or the like. You won't crash nearly as often. D) Toe the line and grin and bear it. Sadly, that's the most likely outcome for Joe and Jane Doe.
Reading through this article I noticed that a lot of his time was spent on problems specific to windows (pop-up, virus, etc). I've been using Linux on my home computer since '95 and I probably still spend a comparable amount of time on computer related maintenance. Thankfully, it's not system crashes but chasing down the occasional weirdness with hardware compatability or situations where an application's features are not 100% functional. At least with free software I don't pay for bug fixes (generally) but there are still problems and the 100% functionality can be very irritating.
I found it interesting that he noted the absurdity of having to "agree" with so many legal documents just to maintain the system.
I probably spend a comparable amount of time myself.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
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
Well, I suppose if they were a mechanic they might. The problem is a lot of us arn't "mechanics". I was into building and fixing PCs in high school. But after a while I 'knew everything' and it got to the point where it was more tedium then excitement.
I'm about to graduate with a CS degree. I enjoy programming, and I don't mind tinkering with my own machine once in a while. But really, asking me to fix a computer would be like asking some guy who works at ford doing some kind of advanced engineering to fix their car. The person could do it, probably, because they are a good engineer in general but it would be a huge pain.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
And not because I run Linux. I simply don't mess with my computer any more. I've had the same motherboard, even the same CPU for over two years. It's irritatingly slow, yes, but I don't have any money to upgrade.
So the box just sits there, chugging along, without any problems.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The amount of actual work that gets done on computers is vanishingly small. I would guess the ratio of productive work units of time compared to [reboot/reinstall/reconfigure/restart/find/lose/fi nd again/corrupted file/driver missing/hardware failure/wrong version/broken fonts/where's the
install instructions] units of time is perhaps 1:100 and that's being very, very liberal.
Problem ONE with computers is the total lack of adequate backups. Yeah yeah Norton Ghost and tar and yeah yeah yeah. Back up a 120GB hard drive with Ghost and a CD-R. My ass.
Then try to restore it. BWAAHHAHAHAAAAA!!!
And yeah, I use Linux too. It installs great, and it runs great and then you start configuring things, and about 47 weeks later, you have lost all interest in working on anything.
Every time I'm walking through the computer store looking for some obscure item absolutely necessary to make yet another attempt to get some fucking work done I walk by them Mac G5s...
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I have a few plumbers, painters, etc. in the family.
:-/
What I've noticed is that people expect to pay these guys to come around and fix something.... Even if it's relatively close family.
For some reason my time seems to be worth less than theirs
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
Our home network consists of three Macs and a PC running XP Pro. One of the Macs is a two year old G4. Two are older--much older G3's.
Our chief time waster is the router, a Linksys. It maintains a dynamic IP connection over our DSL and has four internal connections. Occasionally, for reasons that are probably external, that connection slows to a crawl. We "refresh" it by rebooting the router. Let's say 20 "person-minutes" per week on that one (the five minutes it takex to reboot and reconnect x 4).
Our shared printer, an insignificant HP Deskjet, probably isn't up to the task. It's getting old, and it jams every couple of months. I attribute this to wear on the rollers. When it goes, it's a time waster, usually involving my son and/or myself cursing, scratching our heads, snatching out shreds of paper, burning our hands, and printing out test pages. I'd figure an hour every 2-3 months.
The G4 has a quirk in its file system that necessitates repairing it weekly. Ten minutes. I could resolve it by re-formatting. Monthly virus update runs in the background and other utilities (backup, virus scan) run at night. Updates from Apple about monthly, no expenditure of time, an occasional reboot.
The two older G3's never cause a minute of trouble. The desktop had a "carry in" upgrade about eighteen months ago.
The PC is locked up in my son's room where it never sees the light of day. My guess is he keeps it well maintained and spends some average amount of time each week applying patches and updates.
We could probably total up an hour a week if we tried very hard.
Anne
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
I read about his experiment yesterday and I could not agree more. I got two very different extremes of his concern:
1. I am a Mac switcher. A little bit after I switched to Mac I noticed that, once the euphoria of the new computer wore off a little bit, and OS X stopped being a novelty to me, I was running out of things to do in the computer. I thought I was hallucinating, because as far as I could tell, and this includes many years messing with every flavor of Windows plus SuSe and freeBSD, I seemed to be spending at least one hour less per day in front of the computer. Then I figured it out: I was too used to spend about one hour a day just doing things to keep the PC running.
The Mac was pretty much maintenance free and updates don't come out every day, so unless you are a tweaker, there is not a lot of stuff to do to mess with the OS itself. Most apps I use check for an update on startup, and on my daily list of websites to visit is versiontracker, which will tell me any other of my apps that needs to be updated.
2. At work I wear many hats: I am the lead programmer, but at a moment's notice I have to switch gears and become the CIO/CTO/Director of Technology/Mac guy/Windows server Guy/Network Guy/Printer Guy, etc. I work for a 14-employee company, and I am the only technically-oriented person (everybody else is either a biologist or a statistician). I kept having trouble because even if I only spend about 50% of my week working on programming tasks, I was always working 60 hours weeks because of all the odd jobs that had to be done around the office. Worse, there was no way to track these, so my timesheets for a week would show 20-30 hours broken down between a few billable projects, then another 20-30 hours clumped as "IT."
I started using Issue Tracker (issue-tracker.sourceforge.net) and forced myself to write a trouble ticket for every stupid little request I was made. It did not matter if it was a 5-minute job: if it was not a "billable" task, it would go into the issue tracker. After a couple weeks, I got to the same conclusion as Marshall. All these little jobs suck in a hell of a lot of time. The 5-minute printer clearing job is actually a 15-minute job: 5 minutes for somebody to come to you to interrupt what you are doing, explaining the problem, then 5 minutes to fix and test and a final 5 minutes to explain the problem was fixed and to return to work.
The worst thing was that the boss acutally had the nerve to tell me that the reason I was working 12-hour days was because I was goofing off 8 hours at the office and then catching up from home. Now I can show him the issue tracker log and show him that no, even with 14 Macs at the office there is just too much crap that has to be dealt with thru the day.
The Macs at the office run fine, thank you. Even the ones still on OS 9 (*cough*cheapskate boss*cough*). Most problems we have with the Macs are due to programs we run in classic mode (have I hinted at how cheap my boss is?\): once these lock up there is no way to kill just one classic app without restarting the classic mode itself. The two Windows servers are cheap and sturdy but require constant TLC. Thanks God the mail server is freeBSD.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
I remember the days of heavy lifting to maintain the home network. They are all but gone now. Our primary boxes are my wife's XP Pro workstation, my Powerbook, and a Linux mail/web/listserver/Samba/whatever I need server in the basement. We have a little firewall appliance with the server directly connected, and the other stuff using wireless. We have almost no down/maint time...certainly not 11 hours per month. Here's how: 1. Spamassasin 2. Auto download of updates and a couple of clicks a month to install the ones I want. 3. Occasionally check for and install new firewall updates. 4. Virus and system checker run on the XP box nightly. 5. Automagically back up system files on the Powerbook with a third party system maint utility. Once you have it all set up, your home network can hum along pretty smoothly with very little work. Even if you add a couple more machines it shouldn't really impact your maint time...unless you're doing some serious dinking. But that's fun, not work.
While doing some recabling at a law firm I found a 486 server (running) in the back of a cuboard. No one knew what it was for. It was running some crypticly named binaries but wasn't seeing that much network traffic.
So, we shut it down it, and all at once their fancy account system (apparently running on a dual xeon windows 2000 server) died. Turns out this machine had been handling the business logic for years and the last lot of cowb^H^Hnsultants had just thrown on a new front end and database without mentioning they didn't bother to rewrite or port the app.
I had the same experience with a 386 running Netware tucked into a corner of an office. Nobody knew what it was there for, but it was running the business logic for a payroll system...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Neither do I. Neither does my two brothers.
My aunts , uncles and many friends spend more and more time to fix issues in their system, find anti-viruses, repair damaged files, and even sometimes reinstall the whole system. They run Windows XP.
We run Mandrake and have no such issues.
Your wasted time is exactly why I run Linux. Linux may take a bit of initial configuring, but after it's tweaked the way you like it... just sit back and enjoy.
I rarely spend more than 30 min a month fixing my computer.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Here's a typical day at the supermarket:
./ diet)
Reading nutritional facts on side of lima bean can (you know, cause I'm on the
RING! RING
me: elo?
friend: Hey what was that thing you said I should do last time you were over here
me: you mean shave
friend: no the computer thing, what was it called, frag
me: thinks quake3, no wait - you mean defrag?
friend: yeah think i need to do that, my computer got a monkey and its getting annoying so i tried to delete it and he wouldnt go in the recycle bin, i think i need to defrag him
me: should i tell him? no, that'll just take longer, let him defrag and ill run adaware later - yeah, go to my computer
friend: whos computer?
me: the icon that looks like a computer on the top right of your desktop, double click it
friend: it looks like a fish
me: thats wonderful, open it up and select your hard drive, it will say C: somewhere in the title
friend: i clicked it and it didnt do anything
me: ok now i need you to right click on it and select properties
friend: a window came up that says "system properties" and it has a bunch of tabs at the top
me: oh god he did a properties on my computer instead of the c drive
etc, etc, etc...
me: dude, forget it, I'll come by your place with VNC after i finish shopping, that'll make things easier
friend: whats VNC?
me: why am i such a fucking pushover
And I know I'm not the only one that goes through this. I was next to a guy on his cellphone at Busch Gardens a few months back who went through the same thing. From what I overheard he was instructing his mother to get to defrag through start > run.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
I used to run Windows 2000 Pro on my mom's computer and the kids' computer. The result? Endless problems. They seemed to be absolute wizards at prompting BSODs. It was not uncommon for me to spend 24+ hours every month trying to figure out how they were able to so efficiently ruin a Windows 2000 installation.
I was so desperate one time that I even ventured to install Windows Crap 98.
I've since upgraded to Windows XP, bought/installed Ad Aware 6 Plus (w/ Adwatch), turned on automatic update/install, and blocked programs such as Kazaa. The problems I have now? Almost none. I probably average 2 hours a month at most. Some months may have more, but my average fix time is probably 5-10 minutes. XP is just much better for computer illiterate users. It's harder to break and when it does break...there is usually recourse that doesn't involve an installation CD and late nights.
Spend the 100 dollars. You'll reap it in the time you save.
Clif
clifgriffin > blog
I've had two really bad experiences.
1. My ex's father replaced the gas tank on my car, I paid for the tank and paid him for doing the work. He own's a fully equipped professional garage so it didn't take long at all, about 40 minutes. Later, when he had a hard disk failure, at his garage business, I was called in to rescue any data and help install a new hard drive about 10 minutes for the disk, but hours rescuing the data. Needless to say he paid for the hard disk and then gave me a big thank you and thought it was even. No attempt at giving me any money, and he felt quite offended when I tried to hit him up for money. After that, his computer problems were just that, his problem.
2. About 7 years ago when scanners and color printers were not as widespread as they are today, I did some photograph restoration work for a friend of mine. Lot's of touch up work on the aged photos and printing out on, expensive at the time, photo paper. I had about 20 hours of work and about $20 in paper plus whatever ink that it used. He also tried the give me a, "Hey, thanks man!" kind of payment. But he owned a bar where I was a regular at. 3 weeks later, my companies payroll didn't come in on time, and I was planning on going out that night. I went to his bar, asked to run a tab, and he looked at me as if I had just shit on his floor. He claimed he didn't know me well enough, even though we had drank together several times, been over to his house, been to concerts, and restored his pictures for free.
Just because I like computers, doesn't mean I do it for free!
My next Slashdot post will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
This makes me wonder why I haven't had to spend more than 2 or 3 hours last year "fixing" my system running Windows 2000 - quite a low TCO, really. Which is about the same amount of time I spent that same year "fixing" my Debian box. Heck, even at work, where I manage about 40 XP boxes, 10 Linux boxes and a few Macs running OS-X, and users have full control over their own machines, the average attended maintenance time per Windows machine isn't much more than 8 hours a year. I may just be really lucky, but any half-decent sysadmin plans, audits and anticipates.
Windows is guaranteed to run on hardware listed on the hardware compatibility list. If you pick any other hardware, it's pretty much your own responsibility to get it to work (and rightfully so). You'll find the same goes for pretty much any flavour OS.
A friend at work has this exact same problem and his solution was to tell family that they have a choice (1) he would update Windows one last time and that was it. (2) Switch to Linux and he would maintain the systems. Since most of the family were surf/write/e-mail people and not gamers they picked (2). Also all of them had high speed access. Now he maintains all the machines remotely and keeps them updated by accessing them about once a week. He said there was much bitching and moaning at first but now that everyone is used to it things are pretty calm and simple for both them and him.
Hey, it's a waste of time if that's how you feel about your relationships with your loved ones. Goodness, I go out of my way several times to help my good friends to fix their PC problems. And I still don't mind doing it till this day.
Reasons? Because relationships matters to me. And I enjoy seeing the happy looks on their faces when things are solved. Of course, I'm only a geek not superman. There are times you have to know your limits and tell them to either buy some decent anti-virus software, stop installing crap without knowing what it'll do to their PCs and just exercise some plain common sense.
Lastly, our lives on earth are short. No matter how much $$ you work to get, it's not going to double/triple/x times your lifespan. But good karma follows you into your future lives.
Reality is what we taste, smell, see, hear and touch yet we cannot comprehend it...only approximate it.
You dont put a linux machine on the internet, naked to the world, do you? No, you set up a firewall, and/or you have it running behind something running a firewall and NAT.
System management is about managing your systems. You use each piece to do what it does, and use other pieces to do what they do. Its not about sticking your head in the sand and thinking your ub3r-boxen is a do-everthing swiss army knife.
And no, I wasnt vulnerable to that remote RPC stuff (as you so eloquently put it), because my systems are up to date on their patches, and because they are protected behind a firewall. I talk more about my network here. But honestly, you are way trolling. Either that, or you just dont know what you are talking about. Or both, because they arent mutually exclusive.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
umm... some of the time taken for some tasks is rediculous. Loading motherboard drivers for 4 hours?? Fixing a printer driver for an hour? Windows update for an hour?
Either he's on a really slow computer, or he's just stupid.
- they must agree to never disable the Virus Scanner and Firewall
- they must agree to never install games from a cereal box
- they must agree to use Mozilla for web and mail..or Firebird\Thunderbird. (same stuff)
- they must admit that their computer is having problems and they need help.
- they must be open to understanding the importance of updates and the dangers of p2p programs that install spyware.
- they must bring me their computer if they want it fixed. I just can't do it at their places as they are not setup for effective troubleshooting. (incredible how many people that eliminates...can't even be bothered to bring it to you...they want you there)
- they must take an interest in maintaining the health of their system.
Just for some background, I used to work for Dell, and talk to folks like you at least once a week.
Do what I do....
I give free support to all of my family/friends if they have a Mac OS X machine, or FreeBSD and KDE.
I charge half of my consultant rate for any form of Windows.
The reason: Once you have and OS-X or other Unix style operating system set up - the tend not to break randomly. Winodws brakes for no apparent reason -
Clippy: " It looks like you doing somthing productive, would you like me to break Windows for you?"
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Though it's been said by a bunch of people, I'll throw in my 2 cents.
I used to be a pro sysadmin. I worked my way through University being a junior sysadmin with my department - Computing Science. All day long I would fix dinky little problems and install software, etc. After that, I'd come home to my linux box and futz with that so that I could do something like watch a video. Sometimes I'd be up quite a lot of the evening doing sysadmin type things at home. Of course, I also had to maintain my partner's Windows/Linux box as well.
I got tired of it last year. I was spending my time in front of the computer fixing things, not using my machine. I'm a programmer now, but I still don't enjoy doing work when I come home (meaningless work, anyway. Programming at home isn't 'work'.) I still have a FreeBSD mailserver that I have to maintain, but it's one of those things that takes a few days to set up right and then requires little effort after that. My main machine is now a G5. It requires no work. It took me a while to figure out why over this holiday season I was sitting in front of my computer with nothing to do. It's because I had nothing to fix. The worst problem I've had since I got this machine was I briefly had a firewire problem when I did the firmware update. I rebooted the machine and it went away. By comparison, I recently installed WinXP pro on my partner's machine, and already the machine is giving me issues, with a drive only intermittently showing up in Windows. I think it's a driver issue with the on-board Promise Ultra ATA controller, but it's still ridiculous. The operating system had only been on the machine for an hour and I was already fighting with partition magic and windows to try and recognize the drive was there, and if they found it was there, to try and reformat it.
My partner covets my Mac. The next machine she buys will be a Mac, too.
A friend brought by a computer the other day to have me "fix" it - of course it was riddled with pop-ups and worms, and had about 3 dozen autorun programs that took over the whole system. We backed up critical files and then re-installed Win XP Home. A basic install of XP took about 3 hours, then I had to remove some of Microsoft's spyware. Then we decided to install Norton Internet Security 2004 on the machine. In the middle of the install, Symantec's program hung up, and we couldn't remove it, if was half-way installed and took the computer's neworking capability down with it. The only clean solution was to reformat and reinstall Win XP over again. Due to the nature of Windows, there is no easy way to clean up the system once it gets screwed up, and this is the final straw for me relating to Symantic software. I will NEVER use their crap again. We've constantly had problems. I wish I could bill them for the wasted time due to their crappy software.
About that point is when I talked my bosses out of buying dells and started buying from a local shop! After spending 8-10 hours of my time trying to get a replacement dell power supply out of them that I knew was bad had the part number and wanted to pay for, but couldn't get directly from their website, I said "hang it"! That was entirely unacceptable. Now I buy from my local shop...everything's standard, and it takes less time and money [and time == $$!] to simply drive to the store and get another, than waste even 2 hours on the phone with them! After all, I'm cheap as far as IT goes but 2 hours is still $60+ for my employeer...and unpaid OT for me because of what I'm NOT getting done while playing with their "support". It may be a "cheap" PC, but if a single support call costs you 8-10 hours, you could have bought half a new PC for what you're paying your IT guy to sit on the phone. That's not cheap at all!
Neighbors are even worse at this...
Its easy to reject your own family, but its worse when your family tells people that you'd be happy to come over and fix the 40 spyware programs, full harddrive, and bad drivers on somebody else's computer.
Oh, and of course you have to do this on your own free time.
Perhaps there is a market niche here for "computer mechanics"... but unless this job can pay enough obviously nobody will do it.
The computer-car analogy isn't perfect, though there are plenty of similarities. While both started out as fairly expensive and complicated pieces of equipment, the relative price of computers are going down whereas cars remain expensive. I am comparing fairly ancient cars to modern computers, recent cars compared to computers have different scope for DIY and different main failure modes, so expecting modern cars and future computers to be as similar as ancient cars and present-day computers I would not find realistic. They may have started out similarly but I don't think they will move in the same direction.
That is not to say that there are no lessons to be learned from 100 years or so of automobile history, for example that certain designs are found superior (in terms of safety, reliability, performance and so on) than others, and the "best" designs are allowed to prevail. A similar evolution in the face of a hostile environment will have to take place for computers as everyman's appliances. And I think that the "appliance" model is closer to the long-term goal than the "automobile" model.
Like all kinds of equipment, computers are subject to hardware failures, and the mode of failure tends to be more like what one sees in an appliance like a fridge or a TV set, that is, failure is rather sudden and catastrophic.
There is a difference here of course, that if your fridge dies, you still have access to the food inside, whereas if a hard disk dies, whatever was on it is most likely lost as well. And fridges are not subject to attacks or takeovers from crackers... so the appliance model isn't perfect either. Still, it does suggest a sensible direction forward -- the care and feeding of today's computers is made unnecessary complicated by such nonsense as EULAs, popup advertisements and general obscuration of operation. Case in point: the error message appearing when the anti-virus software needed renewal not even hinting that this was the reason. Some kind of standardized, publically known interface for diagnostics (this particular lesson learned from automobiles) would be the best way of handling this: when something goes wrong or stops working properly, enough information is generated from the event so that most anyone could be able to figure out what needs to be done. A standard code of "subscription is expired" would have been suitable in this case. Say one were to extend and standardize on the POSIX error-numbers or some such, whatever it is should not depend strongly on the actual operating system underneath.
There are some other important differences that preclude computers ever being as easily handled as appliances like fridges or tape-recorders, for example that while computers are are generally programmable, whereas a fridge or a tape-recorder are single-purpose and once sold and installed they do not need "updates" to their internal structures; in stark contrast to a computer where the software within may require changes for continued operation.
There are also some fairly obvious physical reasons why mechanical equipment like cars have to be serviced regularly, as they are subject to wear and tear, but there are no obvious physical reasons why a running computer should have to degrade in performance with normal use. I think our expectations have become too low in what we expect here. Like you say about limping along with a less than healthy computer OS. People do it and they bitch and moan about it...yet they don't seem to demand a stop to much of the nonsense.
So while we will have to require bugfixes and updates to computers, these should be made easier to perform so that the "power-user" can concentrate on getting his job done, like his automotive equivalent, the taxi driver.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308