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Some Users Say Win7 Wants To Remove iTunes, Google Toolbar
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.
If you upgrade Windows on top of another installation you are in for a bad time.
iTunes and Google Toolbar are annoyances anyway. If they could permanently get rid of Quicktime, I'd be a happy camper.
Finally, a good idea from microsoft.
Oh, wait, they expect us to muddle along with the windows media player instead. Pot, kettle, frying pan, fire.
First, this obviously applies only to upgrades.
Second, iTunes does horrible things to your USB stack, and it needs to go.
After Win7 is installed you can add it back, and not lose any of your music.
Don't make a big deal out of Microsoft trying to remove the effects of misbehaved software corrupting the install.
There is no issue here.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Windows 7 recognizes how bad iTunes is? Even XP can't do that! I'm switching right now... Where'd I put my MSDNAA login?
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
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.
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.
Here's the a quote from the article of a user who found that Windows 7 asked that the user uninstall iTunes:
...and I reinstalled iTunes which worked fine without any configuration, my library and apps were all there.
While I agree it is suspicious that iTunes and the Google Toolbar were the only applications that Windows 7 ask that particular user to uninstall, it should be made clear that Windows 7 did not impede the user from using that software or foist a MS application on him.
I will note that many users had significant difficulties with using non-Apple software after upgrading to Snow Leopard.
I myself have had significant difficulties using already installed software after upgrading various shared libraries via ports on FreeBSD.
I would suggest that these issues are along the lines of what Microsoft was doing when it asked the user to uninstall iTunes and the Google Toolbar.
From TFA:
Yep - a disaster in the making.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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.
What a crappy, dishonest summary! I despise MS as much as anyone, but this is too much. Yes, it asked them to remove iTunes, etc., but then it reinstalled them! And everything worked.
No sig? Sigh...
A) Only upgrade installs
B) The 7 installer detects known incompatible software and asks you to uninstall it, making it very clear that it's going to do so.
This is a non-story.
Did the poster even read the article? The summary is longer than the sentence that mentions this.
"The upgrade process gave me a list of about 5 programs to un-install," he says. "Which I did, it was some drivers, iTunes and the Google Toolbar." What does the author say about this horrible, horrible thing? "I have to say that is about the most successful Windows upgrade I have ever personally experienced."
That's not sarcasm, that's not some biting commentary at microsoft, that is a user who is content with his instillation of Windows 7 on a computer. This is not an article about how microsoft is afraid of competition and squashes even the slightest attempt at competition, this is about how 3 people were relatively happy with their instillations.
The poster picked the single most insignificant statement out of context, and made it their headline. I'm not sure if the poster was being ironic, or trying to troll linux fans into reading a pro-microsoft article, but the summary has almost nothing to do with the article.
The upgrade didn't make you purge your computer of open source software. Windows 7 didn't make you uninstall OO.O, or even Lotus Notes (which really, needs to die). The upgrade did not purge your computer of competitor's software, it just so happened that those 2 programs needed to be reinstalled.
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.
Can I play a bit of devil's advocate? My guess is that the need to remove iTunes and Google toolbar might be related to compatibility issues (i.e., the version that the users have currently not being the "latest" one, or the one "100%" compatible with 7). Without any more concret info, like the version number for iTunes of all the machines involved, if 7 "demands" diferent things with the same version installed, etc, we can't really be sure what's the issue here, and assume it's for the best for the users (not having potentialy incompatible software installed on 7).
Now before someone says "but I've been using iTunes 2.0 with 7 since forever!!", well, I'm just speculating as much as the next guy :) Afterall, this is Slashdot, right? ;)
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
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.
An operating system shouldn't need to touch anything but OS components to do an upgrade install.
Device drivers, such as the iPod driver that comes with iTunes, are obviously operating system components. (If you disagree, please explain.) Google Toolbar is a web browser component, and Microsoft calls Internet Explorer part of the operating system.
> 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.
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"
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.
And leave the awful player and browser plugins out.
In fact I am not anywhere near a computer. I am doing everything remotely: sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
eh, I had no problems with the latest versions of both iTunes and Google Desktop (which includes Google Toolbar.)
Maybe they had older versions?
Heck, I had more compatibility issues upgrading from Leopard to Snow Leopard.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
For some reason, Apple decided to use their own USB driver; one not exactly known for it's stability, evidently. Yes, Apple would rather risk your system instability than use a standard tried & tested driver to write files to any iPod. That'll be why Windows 7 doesn't like it I expect.
http://www.google.com/search?q=itunes+BSOD
Sometimes I wonder if Apple make PCs crash deliberately to fuel their ad-war
throw new NoSignatureException();
My experience with Windows 9x matches GP's claim. If you had a broken installation and tried to fix it by re-installing without deleting the old installation, it would copy the broken settings and usually work even less than before.
Maybe GP still remembers that time and based his statement on that ;-)
I'm not so sure about newer versions, as I made a habit of doing always clean installs back then. Never tried to "repair-install" W2k or later.
C - the footgun of programming languages
The MS haters are running scared right now. Windows 7 seems to be getting extremely favourable press overall, and the public is highly interested in it. Apparently on Amazon UK, Windows 7 preorders are not the highest for any product they've ever sold, a Harry Potter book holding the previous record. http://gizmodo.com/5386553/windows-7-amazon-preorders-beat-even-harry-potter
Thus it isn't a surprise we are seeing zealots step up the FUD machine and try to spin anything they can as Windows 7 being bad. They are worried that people are going to like it and use it and Microsoft will continue to maintain a position of dominance.
I will not install or run win7 until there is a 3rd party alternative or a MS patch that gives me explorer back.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
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.
True story: I recently got a new computer and set it up for dual booting Windows/linux. It took me more time and more restarts to get Windows working normally even though the computer actually came with windows preinstalled and i had to instal linux from scratch.
Apple no longer sells DRMed AACs. AACs you rip yourself have never had DRM.
I've had it for a week or two now. Just installed it on bare metal yesterday (as opposed to a VM).
Apparently MSDN Academic Alliance gets it just as early.
My biggest issue is: eight gigs? Really?
Other than that, it does seem to be an improvement over XP, so far. And fresh installs are almost always better than upgrades.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If they opened up the iPod communication protocols, none of this would be an issue. They could Mac up the Windows port of iTunes to their heart's content and it wouldn't matter, if people had the option to just choose something else.
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...
It's not iTunes that does this. iTunes licensed Gear's ASPI drivers for burning support within Windows. The Gear drivers are Microsoft XP and Vista signed drivers that strictly adhere to Microsoft's rules. On a clean install of XP or Vista, iTunes and the Gear ASPI drivers work 100% of the time. However, many other programs that implement CD-burning without signed drivers can cause the Gear ASPI drivers to break.
If you try to install iTunes 6 on Vista, Vista whines. If you try to use Netscape 4, the internet doesn't work. This is the same fucking thing. Any version of the Google Toolbar or iTunes >7 works fine on Windows 7. If people can't be bothered to update their software, I don't see how this is a strike against Windows. When you upgrade kernels in Linux you get notified that some software won't work properly. What's the difference? It's not just Google/Apple/Linux apps that get a "this app isn't gonna work dude" warning. I was warned about SMAC, Pharaoh, Fallout 1 and 2 and Civ 4 when I upgraded. Are Firaxis, Sierra, Interplay/Black Isle and 2K Games in direct competition with MS? Fuck off. This headline and the entire gist of the article is just as much baseless FUD as the anti-Linux horse shit that MS puts out.
Keep on knockin'
https://robbiecrash.me