Three things I hate:<\/p>\n
OK, so I know that’s only really two-and-a-half things, but stuff it. I spent most of yesterday (and a large part of the day before) cleaning up the laptop belonging to our Director. The copy of Norton Anti-Virus has been nagging her since August<\/i> that its subscription has expired and she hadn’t mentioned it, or tried to update it. I only found out about this because other Strange Things were going on with it.<\/p>\n
First, primed with her credit card number and billing address (!) I updated her copy of Norton, then in an effort to clean the thing up, I ran the spyware-checking utilities AdAware<\/a> and Spyboy Search & Destroy<\/a>. This found a couple of Gator-related spyware things, which she’s had before (and I’ve cleaned off before!). Then I decided to run Windows Update.<\/p>\n Given that I don’t run Windows, I’m generally spared the horror that is Windows Update. You go there and you see a big friendly button saying “Click here to download all critical updates”. It lies.<\/p>\n Click button, stuff downloads, stuff gets installed, reboot.<\/p>\n Go back<\/i> to Windows Update, see “Click here to download all critical updates”. Hmmm, thought I’d already done that …<\/p>\n Click button, stuff downloads, stuff gets installed, reboot.<\/p>\n Lather rinse repeat, except that this time it’s Windows XP Service Pack 2 which is huge<\/i> – something like 300MB; just as well we had that connection upgrade recently, really.<\/p>\n After the next reboot, it’s “Click button, stuff downloads, stuff gets installed, reboot.” again<\/i>.<\/p>\n Stupid thing. I realise that some upgrades may have dependencies, but frankly that’s ridiculous.<\/p>\n Anyway, it’s now back in working order, with auto-updates switched on (I realise that can be a double-edged sword, but it’s probably the best option for a machine that I only see when it breaks).<\/p>\n To be honest, I can hardly blame $DIRECTOR for not keeping her laptop up-to-date and secure – that’s not her job and it’s not something which she understands.<\/p>\n There were times yesterday, though, when I felt like just whipping out the Debian installation CDs and putting a Proper Operating System on. Given that she only uses Word and Powerpoint, I could probably have got away with that: “I’ve upgraded your laptop” might have convinced her.<\/p>\n \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three things I hate: Laptops; Windows XP; Laptops running Windows XP. OK, so I know that’s only really two-and-a-half things, but stuff it. I spent most of yesterday (and a large part of the day before) cleaning up the laptop belonging to our Director. The copy of Norton Anti-Virus has been nagging her since August… (read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}