"Your computer contains various signs of viruses and malware programs presence..."

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

“Your computer contains various signs of viruses and malware programs presence. Your system requires immediate anci viruses check! System Security will perform a quick and free scanning of your PC for viruses and malicious programs.”

This is what I got by going to see dilbert.com.

Enough’s enough.

I just got home with a new iMac, and jesus christ on crutches this is a nice nice computer. I got it started, configured for my nonstandard network, and started using it in almost no time. The whole thing is just pretty, like an iPod - and I usually don’t go for that sort of thing.

Yes, it was expensive, but I’ve been buying Windows machines for years, and have about 8 of them around the house and another dozen at work. I get another every year or two. No way has any of them been close to this nice.

Wow, what a nice product.

2

OK.

But, in fairness, if you set up a Windows machine correctly, you can have every bit as pleasant an experience.

Create a “Standard” (Windows Vista or 7) or “Limited” (XP) user for web browsing. Install Firefox and Adblock Plus.

Save a huge pile of money.

3

We bought a Mac G4 Cube back in the day. Cost a fricking fortune, but my wife just looooved the way it looked.

I’ll never buy a Mac computer again. We’ve had fewer issues with the Dell we’ve owned for the last 4-ish years.

Joe

4

Yeah, yeah. The thing is, Windows machines can’t be set up correctly. They never, ever work right, not even once, not even briefly. If I ask ten different Windows experts how to set it up right, they will have eleven answers. The only thing they’ll agree on is that whatever I’m doing isn’t right.

I bet a Windows PC makes more mistakes during bootup than there are people.

5

Can you provide some linkage. This is interesting.

6

Today, I spent over an hour fighting with my Windows machine, trying to make it work with my new wi-fi HP printer. Downloading drivers, install programs, running tests, having the computer not see the printer. In frustration, I decided to go over to my iMac and see if the printer was set up properly on the network. In less than a minute, I had installed the printer and had a test page in my hand.

Back to the Windows machine. Another hour of futzing around, and I finally had working what took me a stinking minute on the Mac.

Windows is for masochists.

7

I’ve never looked for links, this is just the way I’ve always done it:

Out of the box, for some stupid reason, every Windows installation has one user, with Administrator privileges. That user can install any piece of software, and if you start browsing the web with it and click on a bad link, that link inherits the Administrator privileges. An average user can have a machine hopelessly infected in 10 minutes (1 if they’re under 25).

Before I ever get any Windows system on the Internet, I log into the default Administrator account. If setting up from scratch, name the default account “Install Software” and create a good password for it. Go into the User Accounts control panel and create a user account for every person who will use this computer, all with “Standard” or “Limited” privileges.

Only after that, get on the Internet.

Use Internet Explorer to visit one web site, and one web site only: mozilla.com and download the latest version of FireFox and install it. Once installed, visit mozilla.com again and check Ad-ons, look for “Popular” and install Adblock Plus. This will require restarting FireFox, and selecting an AdBlock Plus “subscription”.

Once you do that, you should be safe to visit java.com to install Java, Flash.com to install Flash, adobe.com to get Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat) and carefully check every installation, choosing “Custom” every time to uncheck all those toolbar “options” that are oh-so-helpfully pre-checked.

After that, log out of the Install Software account and log into one of the Standard or Limited accounts. As long as you only use Install Software to deliberately install software that you know and have good reason to trust, you will be fairly free of Spyware infections.

Every user that I have set up in this way has a solid, working system. In every case where they did get infected, it turned out that they had given the Install Software password to their kid to install some fucking game (usually web based, and spyware ridden).

One other tip: If you are installing software, and have kids - if you step away from the machine for even a second, hold down the Windows key (the one with a flag on it) and press L. This will “lock” the account and you will have to re-enter the password to unlock it.

8

No, HP printers are shit. Years ago, HP used to make printers.

Brother makes printers. Epson makes printers.

HP makes ink sales locations.

9

I could almost agree with you, gaffa, if this wasn’t just the continuation of a pattern. Similar things happened with cameras, scanners, wireless mice & keyboards (the Bluetooth mouse on my wife’s Windows 7 computer STILL periodically stops reacting), and every other damned thing we hook up. An hour of screwing around with drivers and installation programs on Windows; plug & play on Mac.

Loading Windows 7 for the first time really showed me how much Microsoft cares about its users. Wipe all of my applications and reinstall them? Really?

10

Speaking as a system admin (Windows, Mac, and Linux, bitches!), the OS wars have me closer to pulling out my hair and finding a clock tower than anything any individual OS has done.

All I’m going to say is this:
Anyone who claims Mac is superior and everything “just works” has never tried to get it to do the supposedly out-of-the-box CIFS-based file sharing and use of Active Directory authentication on a primarily Windows network.
Anyone who claims Windows is superior and is cheaper has never actually tried to price out a Windows machine that is comparable to a Mac Pro. You can start with the price of Nehalem Xeons and the motherboard meant to run 'em.
Anyone who claims Linux is more stable has never used any machine with a nForce chipset handling network operations.

And all of 'em are light-years better than Coyote Point or Sonicwall “enterprise” networking gear.

11

I just had this screaming one-sided argument with a OS vendor. Except it was Red Hat Linux moving an old test machine from RH4 to RH5.

12

Macs are the worst computers ever and have the dumbest operating system ever conceived, and I’ll explain why as soon as I finish cleaning my registry!

13

As someone who’s worked with more O/S’s than I can remember, all have their strong and weak points.

O/S upgrades are one of these. Where major upgrades are concerned (usually one full release number to the next) a reinstall of everything is usually the best course, but not the only one.

Upgrades DO work, if you are very careful, plan, plan, plan and test, test, test and always do a full backup before attempting an upgrade.

BUT, if there are problems, the first recommendation from any vendor is ‘wipe it clean and do a ground up install’. Because that is the easiest solution. There are even such things as ‘rolling upgrades’ that allow for uninterrupted processing during an upgrade, but they rarely work.

FWIW

14

With Snow Leopard, upgrading is basically the only option. If you want to do a scortched-earth installation, you have to format your drive yourself. When you simply insert the disk and click “install”, as most non-ultranerds would, it simply upgrades the OS without touching any of your files or applications. You don’t have to make any decisions beyond selecting a language.

No CD key.

No preemptive driver compatibility check.

In fact, it often recovers 10 or so GB from your hard drive by removing the unnecessary components from the previous version of the operating system.

Compare and contrast that to any other OS installation experience you’ve had. My favorites include having to install Windows 95 onto a blank drive just to install Windows 98 because the Windows 98 disk was only an upgrade disk, or the time someone told me that Ubuntu is the ultimate windows replacement for everybody and I only found out after installation that there were no drivers for my laptop’s wifi card, ethernet adapter, usb ports, or (most interestingly) display screen.

15

I’ve had experiences similar to that with CentOS, and my “see you and raise” is that my install-and-configure procedure for Windows machines at work is currently:

  1. Add new blank machine’s IP address to RIS server’s list
  2. Turn on new machine with network cable plugged in
  3. Wait 15 minutes

Realistically, Macs in the default case have a significantly easier time than anything else because that’s the way they’re designed–no weird hardware to ever worry about, because a Mac OS install disc will simply refuse to load on a motherboard that follows the exact same standards as the one in your Mac but is a slightly different model number. This has both upsides and downsides, but for Joe Average Webuser, the downsides are only in the (potentially negligibly) higher initial costs.

On the other hand, don’t get me started on Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the cancer that is killing desktop Linux.

16

walks by eating a banana

Yeah? How’s that?

17

Incidentally, there’s a stripped-down version of the Dilbert site with none of the ads and other junk. Just change your bookmark to this one: http://www.dilbert.com/fast

18

I loves me that Bojour! Plug a printer into the network, and Mac has it sniffed out and configured faster than I can think “I need to set up that new printer.”

Compare that to setting up a network printer on Windows, where the first thing you need to remember is that printers not running off a print server (and who uses those any more?) have to be set up as local printers. :confused:

As much as I love Macs and hate Windows, I have to agree with **Zeriel **100% on the pain of getting Macs to play nice on Active Directory.

19

Because it claims to be a lot more ready for the home user than it, in a great many cases, is.

20

This is the most common “I should understand this but I’m doing something wrong so it must be IT’s fault” call I get–people trying to install an unauthorized networked printer and then wondering why it doesn’t show up when they search for network printers.