Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Some Users Say Win7 Wants To Remove iTunes, Google Toolbar

Posted by timothy on from the you-choose-the-teapot-you-choose-the-tempest dept.

Foofoobar writes "Due to a strike with the UK's postal system, people in Great Britain are getting copies of Windows 7 early and have already posted their experiences about the install process. Some have an easy time but others post installs taking 3 hours including Windows asking them to remove iTunes and Google toolbar prior to installation." The article indicates that many of these early users, though, are having better luck.

33 of 570 comments (clear)

  1. Windows Upgrades by Reason58 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you upgrade Windows on top of another installation you are in for a bad time.

    1. Re:Windows Upgrades by Lord+Byron+II · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't know ... why don't you have these problems? What is your secret?

      In my experience, if you have a real, live system and you upgrade Windows, you can expect everything non-MS to break. Critical registry entries get deleted, DLLs go missing, directories get moved and everything goes to hell in a hand-basket.

    2. Re:Windows Upgrades by dollar99 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I agree with the original poster that people who don't do clean installs are in for a bad time. If you've successfully upgraded Windows on top of an older version you should consider yourself extremely lucky. I prefer to do clean installs and save my good luck for winning the lottery and such.

    3. Re:Windows Upgrades by pandrijeczko · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I can't comment on OSX because I've never found a reason for using it, but I think you will find that Linux upgrades easier because user configuration is held in flat text files which are far easier to parse by an installation script than the Windows Registry is. So provided that Linux upgrades any associated libraries when it upgrades an application, the worst that can happen is that maybe an app won't run properly because of an invalid parameter in an old configuration file.

      Incidentally, I fail to see what all the hoo-hah is about anyway, quite frankly. Unless you're one of these "I need to get Windows 7 installed first because my todger is bigger than your todger" types, then you just do the upgrade when you have time to back the disk properly, format it, install the new OS from scratch and then copy your old files back across.

      It's not as though it's something that needs to done weekly and if you've not got the common sense to set aside the time to do it properly anyway, then you probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

      --
      Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
    4. Re:Windows Upgrades by JohnBailey · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I went from Vista to Win7 RC1 and didn't have any problems. Every time I see a comment like this, I think to myself "Why don't I ever have these problems?" Well?

      Possibly for the same reason I can install Linux and not have to keep a terminal window open for every little thing, or constantly tweak it. We are not drama queens.

      --
      It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
    5. Re:Windows Upgrades by nomadic · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So provided that Linux upgrades any associated libraries when it upgrades an application,

      Which it frequently doesn't. Ubuntu especially is notorious for breaking stuff.

    6. Re:Windows Upgrades by Abreu · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well, I tend to reformat my root partition, but leave my /home partition as is... Never had a problem

      How clean or unclean is this to you?

      --
      No sig for the moment.
    7. Re:Windows Upgrades by Joe+U · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In my experience, if you have a real, live system and you upgrade Windows, you can expect everything non-MS to break. Critical registry entries get deleted, DLLs go missing, directories get moved and everything goes to hell in a hand-basket.

      Exactly, and you want to know why?

      Microsoft follows their publised API's and published guidelines. Most other companies DO NOT. They take shortcuts to try and get things done quicker and almost always get it wrong.

      If it runs on Vista, it should run on Windows 7, if it breaks, the developer fucked up.

      Apple, Real, AOL, Apple, Symantec, Adobe, McAfee, IBM and Apple I'm talking about YOU. Especially Apple, ITunes is an over-engineered crapfest that touches things it shouldn't touch in the OS. (In their defense, they have gotten slightly better lately, but itunes still lives in a dedicated VM on my computer).

    8. Re:Windows Upgrades by nstlgc · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If you call "relying on side effects" "using undocumented features", then yea, maybe. Like that time developers thought everyone runs XP as administrator. Oh wait...

      --
      I'm Rocco. I'm the +5 Funny man.
    9. Re:Windows Upgrades by bill_kress · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If it's asking you to de-authorize it and not remove it, that kind of makes sense.

      I imagine something in the upgrade process can fubar Apple's DRM system and cause it to make iTunes think it's not authorized. If that old install information remains in their database, it might be annoying to remove it (or not, I'm just guessing).

    10. Re:Windows Upgrades by Keeper+Of+Keys · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Really, what do you guys run that causes all these problems?

      They haven't even tried it. They probably had difficulties updating Window 3.1 to 95 or something and have just extrapolated. My upgrade experience, like yours, was smooth.

  2. Sounds good to me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    iTunes and Google Toolbar are annoyances anyway. If they could permanently get rid of Quicktime, I'd be a happy camper.

    1. Re:Sounds good to me by Anubis+IV · · Score: 4, Insightful

      As with most of these types of things, they perform far better on the original platform. Microsoft does the same thing with the Office suite, for instance. I tend to agree that Safari and Quicktime on Windows bug me, but on the Mac, they're great. iTunes on Windows is far inferior to the Mac version as well, not in terms of features, but certainly in terms of performance.

    2. Re:Sounds good to me by Bacon+Bits · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So why can't Apple do what the rest of the world does when it needs to use code from another application... use libraries. You don't need Quicktime's plugins or media player. Just the libraries should be sufficient.

      --
      The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
    3. Re:Sounds good to me by maccodemonkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But the plugin and player are what... 2-3 megabytes of 20 megs? Most of the download is the QuickTime library and the codecs...

    4. Re:Sounds good to me by nmg196 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You posted that like you thought QuickTime is decoding engine, which it's actually an awful cheap media player from the early 90s. An encoding engine is a small DLL - not an entire media player application. There is no NEED for Apple to require QuickTime to be installed, but like much of Apple's software.

      iTunes is one of the most badly written awful pieces of software in mass usage today. It's no wonder Windows needs it to be out of the way while it's installing - it does a LOT of horrible things to your system including installing all sorts of pointless services and modifying many critical bluetooth settings.

    5. Re:Sounds good to me by harmonise · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As with most of these types of things, they perform far better on the original platform.

      That's just a cop out. Quality software can be written for any platform provided the developer puts in the effort to make a quality product.

      --
      Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
    6. Re:Sounds good to me by bertok · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Seriously. I actually like iTunes, but damn is it a resource hog. Sometimes it will chew up 90%+ of CPU for no apparent reason. It will often be unresponsive to clicks for a couple seconds. I am not sure what is so complicated about a music player that causes this.

      And then every time it asks me for an upgrade, it insists on installing Quicktime and other things that I don't want on my PC.

      I don't use Macs, but wonder if all of Steve's apps behave this way...

      I actually need and use iTunes (to talk to my iPhone), but one thing that shits me to no end is that every time I get a point-release update of iTunes, it installs two hidden "on startup" items. I have to use the 'msconfig' tool to get rid of them every bloody time.

      Programs should really stop the habit of silently installing background processes that mostly do nothing except slow down the computer's boot time.

      For example, since Vista, Windows has had a great task scheduler API that lets developer schedule system tasks like "check for update" on lots of complex criteria, such a "30 minutes after the PC goes idle". That way, the processes are only run once per machine (not user), don't slow down the boot, and can close to conserve memory after the check is done.

      And don't get me started with the hideous piece-of-s*** that is Bonjour, which is a system service installed by iTunes that intercepts and modifies DNS requests. It opens your computer to vulnerabilities and has broken some apps. A music player has absolutely no business fucking around with system-wide DNS.

      Every time someone complains that their machine is 'slow', it's either a virus, or I just use msconfig to disable the 50 startup processes installed by crap like iTunes. Miraculously, it turns out that there was nothing wrong with their hardware after all.

    7. Re:Sounds good to me by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Office for Mac runs orders of magnitude better than iTunes on Windows. I don't buy your excuses.

      My biggest complaint is that the only thing I ever use iTunes for is updating my iPhone's firmware. I need a gigantic bloated buggy app for THAT!? Hey Apple: how about making a 5 MB iPhone manager without all the bullshit, eh?

      --
      Comment of the year
    8. Re:Sounds good to me by manekineko2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, but libraries don't attempt to autoload a tray application without the plugin and player.

  3. So by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If they didn't do this we would be reading about how the upgrade breaks competitor's software. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

  4. Summary is Misleading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    TFA says Windwos7 asks you to remove some drivers and apps and then successfully re-installs them when done. That's not quite what the summary implies.

  5. Just One Observation... by pandrijeczko · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've no plans to upgrade to Windows 7 from XP whatsoever but if people are being asked to remove iTunes and Google Toolbar, this implies they are using an "install over the top" upgrade method, rather than "backup, format and install from new".

    And if these people **REALLY** believe that upgrading any OS in this fashion, let alone MS Windows, will end up giving them a nice clean install afterwards, then they probably shouldn't be anywhere near a computer in the first place.

    --
    Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
  6. Re:I'm confused by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And program installers shouldn't need to touch OS components to do program installs.

    Unfortunately, neither of these hold in the world as it actually exists.

  7. Re:You can add them back... by icebike · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes you could make that claim.

    But some parts of iTunes don't run in user-space.

    Apple Mobile Device runs as a service as does Bonjour.

    Its this device driver that needs to go (temporarily) and the system needs a reboot with it gone (in true Microsoft fashion).

    After the upgrade, when you re-install iTunes, the Apple Mobile drivers will be subordinate to the new Windows 7 Device Stage, and all will be well.

    --
    Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
  8. Re:I'm confused by Sir_Sri · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Supposedly windows 'upgrades' are basically an install of the new OS then it tries to copy over/grab all the stuff from the 'old' windows. It's an ugly process, and probably errors are caused by programs it doesn't know how to copy over. Stuff that embeds itself in the OS, itunes messes with USB, Google with search and god knows what, Anti virus with everything could work fundamentally differently on a new OS than an old and figuring out how, if at all, to copy that over is probably a difficult business. This might even be problems with specific versions of said programs rather than the application as a whole.

    Uninstalling applications in an automated way is a bad idea. They may or may not remove *data* associated with the application that the user wants to keep, and may not know how to easily copy over. Believe it or not most people care more about their data, and access to it, more than the OS they use to launch the applications. It's probably better that people who know something about what a 'directory' is, and how to browse them, try to figure out how to copy data over than a lot of users for whom such a terrifying concept is completely foreign.

  9. Re:Not sure the title is correct... by icebike · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > iTunes for Windows is maximum bloatware with questionable value...

    Unless you own an iPhone, in which case its value is pretty well dictated to you by Steve Jobs.

    You really can't own an iPhone without it.

    But somehow, Apple gets a pass for that kind of behavior, and Microsoft suffers FUD posts like this on Slashdot for Apple's misadventures.

    --
    Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
  10. One more /. non Issue here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm definitely not a windows fan(or user). I'm totally a Linux guy, but it seams there's no issue here. The only issue I see is /. loosing credibility with this kind of stories. A major version change of operating system should be installed by a clean install and only morons upgrade. It's only natural that in the process of a new installation Windows tries to uninstall shitty software that mess with the core of the system.

    Windows has plenty of real issues to bash about without this kind of shit.

    If I was some windows user or Fan I would say: "If this is the kind of arguments /. has against windows all the other windows stories must be non-issues also"

  11. That's not an excuse by Rix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    First off, there's no legitimate reason iTunes has to use QuickTime for MP3/AAC decoding. There are plenty of other options. If Apple insists on eating their own dogfood, there's no excuse for installing more than is necessary. Installing iTunes doesn't mean I want their stupid, crippled movie player or plugins.

  12. So install the libraries by Rix · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And leave the awful player and browser plugins out.

  13. Re:Crappy Summary by GF678 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I despise MS as much as anyone, but this is too much.

    For me, the more Slashdot bashes Microsoft unfairly, the less I despise Microsoft. If Microsoft is supposedly so rotten, why does Slashdot feel the need to lie? It makes Slashdot look like it's run by a bunch of idiots with an agenda, and makes me question how much of the bashing of MS is legitimate.

  14. Which software you talk about? by Ilgaz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Oh really? Eye TV 2.x (don't know 3.x), it is self contained .app which you drag to /Applications in mac (pre OS X) fashion. It sits idle there until you launch.

    When you launch, it asks for admin uname/password to install "a device driver" (kernel extension). What kind of horrible, evil things may happen right?

    Well, guess what? Nothing happens. It is because of the kernel/driver model. OS X doesn't give a heck if the device is not plugged in, it just caches the symbols/plist files coming with the driver to a file. So, if you have a Eye TV driver but you don't have Eye TV, that extension will sit there, forever, ignored by the OS _until_ you plug the device having same USB signature. I think you were expecting some stuff outside /System/Extensions , some registry like files, some hidden files... No man, it is just .kext and HFS+ "bundle bit" magic with clever use of directory watching.

    There is no software which will bastardize core drivers of OS X. If you listen to some trouble shooting idiots and downgrade your core OS parts in /System, it is your fault. Nobody is idiot (yet) to do it in automated fashion though. Lets not forget all OS X comes with time Machine now, for free, no "ultimate" etc. crap schemes. Every single OS X user having space on somewhere (USB, network doesn't matter) has hourly backups of changed files including a complete backup of system.

    Oh if you were speaking about Unsanity APE, it was designed from the ground so nobody would feel the need of modifying system files for trivial hacks. What happened? Ask the Logitech idiots who shipped awfully outdated version of it which wasn't able to disable itself.

  15. Re:Windows Upgrades - Oh yeah??? by sdguero · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I never had this problem on my GNU/Linux system. Nor have I ever heard anyone about this issue on Mac OSX.

    Try upgrading a Ubuntu 8.04 install to 9.04 or 9.10 on a Fujitsu S7110 laptop. Forget about pretty compbiz fireworks, wireless networking, and external monitor support without driver headaches post upgrade. I'm cool with it though. It's hard to expect more than MS is capable of doing on a $400 platform when linux is free...

    As for MacOS. Snow leopard is notorious for problems with upgrades and costs at least as much as Windows when you consider the hardware premium. My boss (6 month old macbook pro) AND a friend of mine (1 year old macbook) ran into the "bricking" problem after upgrading to snow leopard(there is mention in this article):
    http://www.pcworld.com/article/171129/snow_leopard_users_4_biggest_gripes.html
    What I really don't like is how Apple will never never never ever ever admit that a problem exists, instead they insist that users are installing "unsupported software" or running with "corrupted files" blah blah blah. My roommate loves Apple and argues with me about this sometimes but I just think of Apple like any other PC/OS vendor, I'm not trying to pick on them (or any other vendor) they just aren't as good as a fanboys and "geniuses" will tell you (like any vendor's fanboys and sales people). And interestingly my roommate has yet to attempt the upgrade on his 1 1/2 year old macbook pro...