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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.

21 of 570 comments (clear)

  1. 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 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.

    6. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.
  4. 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.

  5. 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.
  6. 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"

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

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

    And leave the awful player and browser plugins out.

  11. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. 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).

  14. 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.
  15. 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).