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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 spend half of that time reading Slashdot everyday :-/
With a Dell last Christmas....she called and went through the support desk script and it was determined that she had a software driver issue. They would send out a new driver (since she couldn't access the internet...it was a modem driver). 1 month later and over 40 hrs logged on hold and tech support, she finally went to a friends house, downloaded the driver to a floppy, installed it and it still didn't work. Called Dell and they finally send a tech to replace the modem.
I can beleive it, I've seen it.
WTF? Over?
If he only found 11 hours of stuff to fix, he obviously isn't utilizin his full imagination.
I suggest overclocking, attempting to run a computer submerged in pure water(maybe those two at the same time), or extending the range of a wireless network with items purchased at a hardware store.
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
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
Summary: Writing all this stuff -- time spent: 2 hours.
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.
You're in samsara. The Matrix has you. Things go wrong. You have to fix them.
:')
I've found personally that I spend a lot less time screwing around with broken things now that I'm running MacOS X, but YMMV - for example, my father has a dual-cpu G4, and he's getting frequent UI freezes right now (possibly system crashes - we don't know yet, because he hasn't done the latest diagnostic I asked him to do yet).
This represents a nasty trend, actually - as soon as your own geek foo is good enough that you run out of your own problems to fix, people start to notice that you have supreme geek foo, and then you have to fix *their* problems. So there is no hope. Give it up. Get used to fixing computers. It is your karma.
Unfortunately for me, I am the tech savvy person in my family. I have a brother who is certainly not dumb, but when it comes to the compter, he regards it as a "magic box" or something. On more than one occasion, he has felt the need to box it up and ship it to me. So, not only do I get the priviledge of repairing his PC on my oown free time, I get to pay to ship it back to him.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
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....
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
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.
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.
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 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
The other way to look at this is: "Gee, a free PC arrived in the mail! I've always wanted an extra server box." Soon, requests for your time will disappear.
"Sometimes I have even been known to forget about several systems because they just work."
:o)
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.
As far as I know, it's still running well, with no plans to upgrade it... and I'm sure that with time they will forget about it again
Beep beep.
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.
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
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
They ALL have Windows problems. 50 - 60% of the girls just don't want to see you again.
No, I will not fix your computer.
'nuff said.
A Minesweeper clone that doesn't suck
Thinking back to my support problems, the only recurring issue is on my roommate's PC, which has a flakey WLAN card. I also have to occasionally reboot my cable modem and the router, but I chalk that up to consumer grade hardware.
Thus, 90% of my problems are hardware related, but it doesnt really take very long.
The OS never locks up, the computers dont get viruses or bugs, etc. Oh ya, and I forgot to mention: the entire network runs on Windows 2000.
My point is, if you know what you are doing, and have a smart design, you eliminate almost all of your support issues.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
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
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."
I once spent a month tracking how much time I was spending at /.
...
This guy doesn't have ANYTHING to worry about
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
- 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.
BTW, I have Windows NT servers with over a year of uptime, excluding time spent afterhours applying updates (which you can bitch about all you want, but the fact remains that MS doesnt have no reboot patches), and I have Win2k servers with at least that long. A month uptime is long? No way, only a month of uptime is weak, and there is either a hardware issue, a third-party driver issue, or caused by a non-MS program you are running. So can a Windows box run for over a year without crashing? Hell ya. Easily.
You're kind of cheating there by disregarding the restarts due to necessary patches. Sure, your average linux distribution needs to be patches once in a while as well, but rarely (kernel) to the point of having to reboot everything. Simply rebooting NT will actually solve a lot of problems because every dinky piece of software running on it will be started anew, and memory leaks, stalled/locked/deadlocked software and such disappear..
Still, Microsoft understands very well that as long as it's scheduled downtime, nobody cares about it, as it's after hours.. And, most people don't realize this, but 99% uptime means 14.4 minutes of downtime every 24 hours. If you save that up over a month (an attainable uptime even with NT 4.0) you get over 7 hours to go down at your choosing.. And if High Availability actually matters to you, they'll gladly charge you for it.
BTW a lot of patches that tell you to reboot don't actually need the system to reboot.. Simply stopping and restarting some services will do nicely if that's even needed at all - just like most patches on linux or a BSD. It seems to me that Microsoft views the "forced reboot" as a maintenance chore, much like defragging your hard disk.. Software installs will often prompt you to reboot as well - even though it's totally unnecessary.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Oh man, I feel for you - they so totally don't appreciate you. I mean why did they bring you into this world if they were going to force you to use cheap ass Belkin network router hardware that can't support ... what was it, 10 computers under the same roof? They need to learn to -appreciate- you, to take into account your elite skills and contributions to the household. Heck, they ought to be paying you to live there, because it isn't like either one of them could keep their computers running and fully operational, free of spam and virii, kernels patched and drives defragged.
Angst - it is a harsh reality for a guy trapped under the iron thumb of a couple of people that just don't understand. We feel for you, and we are pulling for you. Once you taste the sweet nectar of freedom you get in the real world, you will never want to go back. Good luck surviving next semester under such emotional traumatic conditions.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer