I prefer the analogy that your old car consumes far too much fuel for the mileage it gives you, spews harmful toxins into the atmosphere, puts your and others’ lifes in danger every time you use it, and forces road designers to accommodate for stubborn people who insist on keeping their out-dated no-longer-supported security-risky cars.
Scandisk isn’t searching out files to delete. Your browser’s files became corrupted. Perhaps your hard drive is failing, and you have some bad clusters, or something. Scandisk ran, found it couldn’t fix the files without sacrificing the integrity of the rest of your FS, so they were sacrificed. This is what Scandisk does.
Why would MS even bother searching out Netscape Navigator to delete? So that the five remaining users have to switch to IE and increase MS’s market share in the browser market by 0.000000000000000000000001%? It makes no sense.
I’m sorry, but you’ve gone straight into frothing conspiracy theorist territory. There aren’t enough people in the world still using Netscape Navigator for it to at all be worth it for Microsoft to write a piece of software to detect it and delete it.
But if it makes you feel any better, migrate to Firefox or Chrome or any of the other non-Microsoft browsers, just to show them.
Except it likely wasn’t Microsoft that took it from you. It’s more likely it was a hard-drive glitch that corrupted the files, and Windows simply did what it could do to try and recover from the glitch. It would have removed those files no matter what software they belonged to.
And as Rysto pointed out, there simply aren’t enough Netscape users left for this hypothetical evil plan to actually gain anything for Microsoft. What’s they’re gunning for next in their sinister plan, Mosaic?
Well, nowadays the Internet is large enough to bring a great deal of negative publicity to Microsoft if they tried anything like that. But as I said before, Microsoft has deliberately crippled competitors’ products in the past, and this escaped significant public scrutiny. Most people aren’t likely to have heard of the most notorious incident, which involved Microsoft Windows generating spurious error messages when it detected that the user was using a competitor’s DOS. The competitor sued, but by the time they won the case the damage had already been done. (In fact, IIRC they went out of business before the trial even started; the case was prosecuted by the companies which acquired their assets.)
Back up everything-to a separate drive if possible or at least a CD.
Newer usually is better-That’s why they fix things and abandon the old stuff.
Avoid automatic updates-Do it manually so you know what is happening and can stop it.
Keep recovery software ready-You might recover deleted files.
Used computers and memory are dirt cheap. My neighbor had a complete system with XP for $30 at her garage sale. It was only 1.2GHZ and 256RAM, but may be more than you are using.
I feel your pain, but move on.
If your hard drive’s as old as your browser, it may be starting to fail. You should take this as a wake up call to make sure you have everything important backed up and a reliable daily back up plan in place for the future.
Also, Navigator stores its bookmarks in a file called bookmark.htm - search your hard drive for that file. It may have been spared whatever it is Scan disk did to the main files. You may find older back up copies available too, usually with something like .old or .bak as part of the extension.
You might want to consider switching to an online bookmark storage, such as Google bookmarks, in order to keep your stuff independent of a browser. YMMV, of course.
Good luck!
I vote conspiracy theory as well. There is simply no point in them going to the effort of looking for a browser than is used by a tiny fraction of the world’s browser users. The public relations backlash if they were discovered would far outweigh the minuscule effect that it would have on making people use IE (because as has been noted they couldn’t do the same to the real competitors of IE). It is possible that you already had some corrupted files that happened to relate to your other browser (not all kinds of corruption are immediately obvious) prior to installing the new version of IE and installing IE just made things bad enough to make Windows want to fire up Scandisk, and Scandisk did its best to repair the damage.
Besides that, Scandisk would be a lousy choice for doing that anyway. It would be easy enough for IE to detect another browser and cripple it all by itself, IF Microsoft was foolish enough to want to risk the controversy.
I think the good Captain is right, and you should start backing up everything you don’t want to lose. Scandisk finding corrupted files is often a sign that your hard drive is starting to fail.
I’m quite prepared to believe that Microsoft is the debbil!!1! but I’m sceptical that they have a nefarious plot to kill off ancient browsers via Scandisk. A failing hard drive feels more Occam-y to me.
Oh look, someone who doesn’t know jack shit about how his computer works is blaming Micro$oft for all his woes. This is new and exciting!
You guys are missing the point I was trying to make. I’m not claiming that Microsoft is targeting Netscape. What I’m saying is that Windows is designed with a set of Microsoft standards and anything that doesn’t match those MS standards is potentially regarded as “defective” regardless of whether or not it actually works. It’s like antibodies - they don’t determine whether some foreign protein is an actual disease or not, they just attack anything that doesn’t match your DNA.
As for other browsers, I have no more interest in switching to Firefox or Chrome than I have of switching to Internet Explorer. I like the browser I have, it works, and I don’t worry about what the cool kids are saying. The problem I’m having is that Microsoft appears to want to force the issue.
As for the idea that my browser is spilling toxins into the internet and putting people’s lives in danger - get real. Explain how a list of URL’s is going to kill anyone (or crash anyone’s computer).
I also think it’s unlikely that this was some beneficial act that Microsoft took on my behalf. That it was saving my computer from some imminent crash that was going to be caused by my using an old browser. If my hard drive was wearing out, it seems strange that I didn’t notice any problems. The only problems that I’ve noticed have been the Microsoft products that either weren’t working (the original problem) or began deleting other programs on my computer (the problem that arose when I updated that non-working program). So I think it’s reasonable to assume the Microsoft programs are causing the problems not solving some otherwise invisible problems.
As for being a conspiracy theorist - I think there’s some evidence that Microsoft has issues with competing companies. If you think that’s crazy talk and Microsoft has never done anything underhanded to give itself an unfair advantage over a competitor - well I guess you and I will have to differ.
A product not working is in fact “a problem” even if the product happens to be a Microsoft one. Saying that your computer was experiencing no problems except for some Microsoft products that aren’t working is like me saying that I’m in perfect health except for my gangrenous left toenail.
(I do not actually have a gangrenous left toenail. This example is for illustrative purposes only.)
On the other hand, you still use Netscape and can’t be bothered to learn how your computer works.
I am not an expert, or even the best person to explain this, but one of the ways that Viruses spread is by people using old browsers that lack the security fixes that were put in place to counter each new discovered threat. In other words if you visit a compromised website with your old browser you may unknowingly ‘contract’ a virus which may turn your computer into a ‘bot’. This ‘bot’ can then be used for a number of things, like co-ordinated attacks on major websites (DDOS attacks)
Your browser also probably lacks protection from phishing websites. For all you know you’ve given your paypal login details to someone who is biding their time until the point where they decide to spend a thousand dollars/pounds/whatever on ebay using your money.
Again I am not the best person to explain this. I just know that you ARE much more vulnerable on the internet when you use an old browser.
Scan-disk has nothing to do with MS or non-MS standards.
Think of it like this: A library buys a batch of books. Usually, they immediately put the sticker with the book’s decimal code onto it, and then put it on the shelf. Somehow, with one book, they accidentally forget to put the sticker on. They ended up shelving it with no sticker.
Now, you work nearby. Every day during your lunch break you come over to the library, read some books, and then go back to work. You don’t check the books out, you just take them off the shelves and put them back where you found them.
When you first happen across this unmarked book, you have the option to inform the librarians that there is this book that isn’t marked, sitting on their shelves. But you don’t do that. You just keep reading through this book for months on end, putting it back where you found it each time.
One day you come into the library and that book is missing. You go to the librarian and ask where it is. They tell you they just discovered it yesterday on their own, and that they had to return it to the publisher. It had probably been one of a bunch of books that they had ordered a couple of months ago, but they had thrown away the list of books that were included in that shipment just last week. As such, they weren’t sure if they were properly the owner of the book or not. It may have been some misguided attempt at donating a book to the library, it may have been something that came in an order that wasn’t supposed to be there. They have no way of knowing, because the information that would have told them was thrown away last week.
Did they get rid of the book because it conflicted with the library’s personal views of what was or wasn’t a proper book for their library? No.
Did they get rid of it just to piss you off? No.
Did they get rid of it because you didn’t inform the librarian when you should have? Quite probably yes.
Ultimately, the problem here is that you’re waiting until the very last moment to update programs. You’re waiting until the very last moment to run scandisk. By the time you bothered to do what you were supposed to, there was no way for the system to correct itself without tossing out information. That the information happened to be a competitor is sheer happenstance. That you really liked that information is also sheer happenstance.
There’s reasons why updates to products are released. There are reasons why scandisk wants to run. If you ignore the greater wisdom of the developers of these products, complaining when you get bit is rather silly.
I find that checks date you were still using Netscape disturbing.
Look, it’s clear you really don’t know enough about how Windows and ScanDisk works to argue about what it did or didn’t do. The only “standard” ScanDisk looks for is that the files are in the proper format on disk. It’s one of the jobs of an operating system to detect these files, and if it cannot fix them, then it must delete them. It would be deficient of the OS to not do that.
It has absolutely nothing do with any kind of “Microsoft Standard” (beyond the standard of how files must be written to disk, which all software running under Windows MUST adhere to).
If it’s actually as you think, deleted because of some kind of bogus “MS Standard”, why did it take ten years for Windows to detect this “non standard” interloper on your machine? Why did nobody else ever have this problem back when the majority of people used Netscape on Windows?
bookmarks thread for the inevitable ‘why doesn’t this website work in my Navigator?!’ thread from LittleNemo
So Microsoft and their “standards” are good enough to run your computer every day for however long you’ve been a Windows user. Their standards that allow you to plug in an HP printer and a NVidia graphics card are ok. Their standards that allow you to run millions of non-MS software titles are just fine. But, their standards that find fault with your physical hard drive don’t suit you. Wow.
Don’t switch to Apple - their standards will hold you back even more. You will be so standardized you won’t be able to do anything weird. If you don’t like standards switch to one of a billion flavors of Linux instead and see how working with loose standards (or a lack of standards) suits you.
Next time Windows tries to alert you that there’s something wrong with your system just tell it fuck off. Don’t let those jerks in Redmond tell you when your hard drive is failing. You know best thankyouvermuch!
Am I the only one alarmed that he’s still using ScanDisk? Wasn’t that phased out with Windows 98/ME? I know that XP uses just plain old ChkDsk. And, while 98 was good for it’s time, both it and ME have a ton of problems compared to even XP.
Anyways, both of those programs are NOT EFFECTED by upgrading Internet Explorer. It’s just not in the installer’s code. That the two things happened simultaneously has to be a coincidence.
Now, your browser is probably old enough that security is not as big a concern–it’s slightly older browsers that are the most problematic. And it is quite likely that you (or someone here) can find an installer for your old browser. (It’s Netscape, try here.
But I would suggest you try Firefox, as it was designed to be as close to Netscape as possible (although the underlying engine was completely overhauled). You can probably find plugins to make it look exactly like Netscape. Heck, you can just download the latest version of Netscape from the link I gave, although I do believe development has ceased, and they recommend Firefox.)
No one says you have to keep it.