My tech got my puter up & running with a MB BIOS upgrade - mine was 6 versions behind; however, Win7 Pro was still not fully happy so we did a 'parallel install' that saves most of your stuff in a 'Windows old' folder that can be deleted later. Good feature but a big HD is required.
My last 2 days have been spent trying to get my programs installed again & settings & options back to my preference. Much of these are frustratingly buried deep in the bowels of the OS. Over 200 Win updates from MS have been inundating me & when they are seemingly done, 40 more are required.
Automation runs rampant with almost constant polling the net for updates or whatever.
I just downloaded Adobe Reader & along with it came a bunch of unwelcome McAfee software that I didn't want & will never run. Within half an hour, McAfee (was never run) was trying to access the net - my Firewall intercepted it. I guess that's the price with getting stuff for free.
It doesn't matter how fast the hardware is, it gets bogged down running all of this needless crap in the background without the user's knowledge, especially without a firewall that triggers alerts. For example, 'Google Earth', even when not running, checks for updates every hour & is difficult to kill. Why every hour? Windows Media Player sends a burst of data somewhere whenever an audio or video clip is run. Why? That's why I don't use it anymore.
I suspect a lot of this stuff with many software providers (Java, Adobe, Google, MS & many more) is a guise for data mining & is quite unethical IMHO. Similarly, my Sony BDP sends data to 'Gracenote' after I've watched a DVD or BD. Why?
Then again, maybe I'm just paranoid...
TAM
