Tuesday, December 18, 2007

McAfee - user out of control

When I bought a new Dell I was forced to accept the Vista operating system. I was quite positive about it. With XP the computer, too often, rips control away from the user. This was such an obvious flaw that I was sure, if they had done one thing with Vista, they would have put the user back in control. How could I have been more wrong? Vista rips control away from the user more than any system I have ever come across in more than 25 years of messing around with computers. It is appalling.

Today, McAfee Anti-virus decided to upgrade itself. After doing so it asked me whether I wanted to restart the system now, or, do it later. I was working so I selected the 'do it later' option and got on with my work. I was asked the same question about every hour throughout the day. At one point I started Task Manager and killed the process but it came back. I was making my dinner later and scanning some documents at the same time and the message popped up again. This time, finger trouble caused me to select the wrong option and everything shutdown without further ado - I WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF SOMETHING!

My Apple Mac does not have such bad manners. Vista causes me stress on a routine basis with little bells dinging telling me it needs to do something. My Mac does not do this, it just lets me get on with my work, or messing around with photos or whatever. My Mac makes me smile. I'm not religous about this. I've used PCs since the 1990s and switched to a Mac in 2004. The transition was not always smooth and I still can't remember how to print screen but it has such good manners it's cute.