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

Network Crap

[Zathraskun]

I'm the victem of cheap hardware... and parents

I spend so much time trying to keep everything running while my parents wont fund the money for an upgrade of our wireless networking equipment and our fuggin router, nor will they let me build a router using linux+smoothwall. It drives me made becuase the cheap router we have now isnt really designed to handle the ten or so computers we have in the house at anyone time, so it drops crashes and burns every oh say 12 - 24 hours killing any of my file transfers.

God knows how much time I've wasted because of this. I want my life back :(

time waste?

[geighaus]

I think he wastes more time writing down this stuff, taking all those screenshots and blaming microsoft for everything.

Re:it'll get worse i'm afraid

[mOoZik]

Ugh. It is the users' fault, so don't pin Microsoft for it. The blaster virus had a patch many weeks in advance. Users didn't update. Uh oh, let's blame Microsoft for it! Let's also blame Microsoft for spywares and virii! Let's blame Microsoft that users have the auto-open feature turend on Outlook. You guys make me sick, you Linux-fucking idiots.

Re:worse

[LO0G]

My father has 5 Mac's in his house, and he was complaining over Christmas about the number of updates and patches he recieves for them - he gets somewhere around 3-4 per day, about half of them requiring a reboot.

Now he uses some kind of update alerter to tell him whenever the 5 bazillion random apps he has installed on the machines has an update so that partly explains it, but don't believe that just because it's a Mac that your experience would be any different.

Re:worse (warning Linux Zealot)

[t0ny]

With Linux and OSS, I can download the latest anything already - license included, no waiting. CDs available overnight from many vendors.

Big f'ing deal. Its free because nobody wants it; certainly not any of the corporations I work at do. I would rather pay for something which is in demand than wallow in free obscurity.

Funnily enough, many a router runs Linux internally...

Im sure that comes as quite a shock to Cisco.

This is all nice, because it leaves lots of money left over for the NOD32 virus scanner, which I run on the Linux server to clean the infected email that Windows boxen fling at me every so often.

Its generally not considered intelligent to blame a company for something over which it has no control. MS isnt the one putting all those computers onto the internet without a firewall, the ISPs are, and so are the users.

Even on your desktop you're paying for software to fix Windows flaws that you've already paid for

Like what? The Google Toolbar blocks pop-ups for free, Ad-Aware is free, and Zone Alarm is free. The only thing I paid for is McAfee Virus Scan, and the program is years old; it is a windows NT version which happens to also run on perfectly fine on Windows 2000. Also, how are Viruses a 'flaw'? How are pop-ups a 'flaw'? I fail to see any of these flaws you claim these programs correct.

Go get a current version of Linux with Mozilla 1.5 and OpenOffice.org 1.1 and have a play. Then when you like it, replace your old Windows servers with something better

Already tried to install linux on two old machines. Two different distros failed to install on either of them. I cant see waisting any more time on a POS which cant even get an install to work properly.