A Fresh New Look

Dr J bought a new laptop yesterday, an ultra light Sony VAIO with Windoze Vista and security that scans your fingerprint/iris/bank records/license/dental records/dna/whatever, just to make sure it's really you switching it on.

At first, I was awfully jealous, not so much of the computer but more of the new look and feel of the operating system thingmie. I'm just a sucker for a whole new look... it goes with my "form over substance" mantra... and after gawking at it over lunch, I sulked upstairs to my little office and my extremely boring looking Windoze XP.

In the next ten or so unproductive minutes, I scanned the web for something that might make my XP look cooler. After all, it was supposed to be designed to be re-skinned, though the only skinning I've ever seen from Microsoft involved extracting money from my wallet.

"I'm not that clever", I thought. "Someone who actually knows what they're doing must have had the same thought as me, and then actually done something about it."

The problem, though, is that it seems like the people who really know what they're doing aren't the nerdy geeks they used to be, and now they're not only tech savvy, they're also money savvy. Just about everything I found that would do what I wanted it to do either a) cost money, b) came with scumware, or c) both.

Bastards! What happened to the open, sharing, caring spirit of the internet? I remember a time when you could get just about anything you wanted for free. People, out of the kindness of their hearts and a solid sense of the greater good would blow huge chunks of their time creating a little program that did whatever, and then they'd upload it so everyone could enjoy their cleverness.

No-one even remotely thought of adding in a few lines of code to steal my email addresses and then turn my machine into a zombie to send out a gazillion emails, or relay my private web habits so that I can be "served" ads that might be of relevance. Such underhanded behaviour was a capital offence.

How times have changed in the few short years the web's been other than something spiders make.

Then I struck gold. I found and installed something called "Vista Anthracite Pack" by Nekh Art Studio. This seemed to fix the window borders but the cursors were still the same old boring XP cursors so the job's wasn't done. That required an "Aero-cursor" package.

Ok... now we're getting somewhere, but it still looks like the proverbial mutton dressed as lamb*.

Enter a little package called "Vista Start Menu" which comes with something called "Yahoo Wigets". The widgets give you the nice big clock, the weather report, and all the other goodies Microsoft has built into Vista, while the Start Menu changes the Windoze XP start menu.

Nice. I now have this shiny, new looking interface that works just the same as it did before.

I didn't realise just how important that last bit was until I spent a few hours with Vista on Dr J's new toy this morning. I came away drained, frustrated and with one overwhelming reaction. "Vista is a load of crap."

While it might look very nice, Windoze Vista takes more clicks to do just about anything, and half the things we wanted to run aren't "Vista compliant". It was disappointing, more for the fact that a)Microsoft built an empire on eye candy so I expected better than this, and b)I didn't think "wow" was short for "wow, this is truly awful".

Ah well. Dr J will get used to it.

I should mention that the VAIO also came with Norton pre-installed. You get a "free" 3 month subscription, after which, the Symantec folk put their hand in your pocket. No thanks. Let's uninstall and get something that actually works. Big mistake!

We clicked "Uninstall", went through the process and rebooted the machine. When we tried to install AVG, we got a warning saying Norton was still installed. Bah! A quick check of the registry showed Norton still there, hogging resources after re-installing itself at boot time.

I went to the Symantec website and searched for "uninstall". I found nothing, so I tediously went through the registry deleting, line-by-line, everything with "symantec" or "norton" in it.

We rebooted, but... yes... you guessed it... like the most persistent of viruses, Norton was back! Didn't the US Department of Justice fine Microsoft about $600mil for doing this with Windoze? I'm sure they did... so how come Symantec gets away with it?

Thank your deity for Google. A quick search on uninstalling Norton yeilded a utility buried deep in the Symantec website... really deep, because I'm sure they don't really want anyone to know it's there. It occurred to me that most people would just give up and re-install the thing. It also ocurred to me that Symantec's counting on it!

Doean't it make you yearn for a simpler life?

*For my non-Australian friends...
"mutton dressed as lamb" - coloquialism. origin unknown. usually refers to a woman well past her prime trying to dress and present herself like a 19 year old.