Bill Gates is a Prick. It’s Back to the Mac.
Bill Gates is a prick.
I have used a PC almost exclusively the past three years. I have five PCs:
- three desktops (XP)
- laptop (Vista)
- Netbook (Windows 7)
Most of the cool stuff happening on the web just wasn’t happening with the Mac and Safari.
So I gave up and joined the great unwashed and started using Windows.
Dropping Internet Explorer was the only change I was capable of to get away from Microsoft. Windows is just fundamentally flawed and purposefully impossible to tweak to get top performance.
And now…
The one PC I used most often has finally ground me down to dust with its slowness. I have done every maintenance known to humankind. All. of. them. Except a complete reinstall. I refuse to do a total wipe of Bill Gate’s Asshole computer.
I maxed out the memory, I upgraded my internet connection. I bought a new wireless router.
I even paid for some “speed-em-up” programs: RegistryCleaner and SpeedUpMyPC. I set them to do maintenance every friggin’ night. No matter.
Page loads are painfully slow. Even email and RSS takes way too many seconds to load. I’m sick of watching the sands through the hourglass or the spinning balls or rotating gradient.
I defrag weekly.
I uninstall regularly.
But yet look at all the processes that are running! And WTF does all that junk mean? And why do I even need to see it? Because programs regularly freeze and Ctrl-Alt-Del brings this up to free me to lose everything at start again!
sump.exe? 51K to pump out the shit Bill Gates is dumping on my drive?
Do I really need svchost.exe to be running in six different places?
After three years, you would think I would know, right?
I don’t have a effin’ clue. I don’t want to know. I want to sit down and go.
Last night was the last straw. I wanted to hook up a web cam for the Giant Media Switchover that was going to happen this weekend. St. Todd DeCubbville is my remote tech support while I put new flat screen into the network of 2 DirecTV boxes, a cable box, a surround sound box, a DVD box, a Blu-Ray DVD box, and the computer to stream video and surf the web on BATV (which I never do.)
He said a web cam would be nice.
No problemo. The laptop has Vista with a built in cam, adding another cam should be a cake-walk. Just plug it it, find it and launch it.
I can hear you chuckling already.
Of course, I had to download a new driver and install it. That took an hour and then Windows didn’t put anything anywhere that told me I was ready to stream video. UStream.tv told me after I used their help section. UStream.tv! told me how to access the cam. Not Microsoft. UStream.
Bill Gates is a Prick.
I kept remembering how nice Mac plugs and plays.
I regularly fired up the G4 just to keep things updated. Usually, it was only Safari and iTunes that upgraded. Nice.
I’m pretty sure Bill Gates sends something every night to the PCs to “upgrade” them.
Rather than face another day of extreme frustration. I fired up the Mac. Pages loaded quickly, email and RSS reading just flew by.
I’m back on the information superhighway after three years of plowing along in a field of manure.
Going back to Mac was nothing. It’s like I never left. Except for remembering that now its Command V or P rather than Ctrl V or P, my Mac still loves me.
Bill Gates is a Prick.
I love AAPL. I’m glad I’m an owner.
For those of you keeping score…
Crapware uninstalled
Avast antivirus wouldn’t download from CNET
Went with AVG
Also uninstalled Google Gears
Please stand by…
Just a note here. You need to download Avast! through the Avast! website, not CNET. Same with Comodo firewall, do it through the actual site, not a 3rd party download site (although I do use CNET downloads for certain things but not those).
@Kirk: I will uninstall the crapware and McAfee. I use CCcleaner regularly. So I’m good on that front. I’ll try the Revo Unstaller. “not that simple…” with Windows it NEVER is! That’s why Bill Gates is a Prick.
I’ll be in touch.
Sixty – I fully agree with Brian, RegistryCleaner and SpeedUpMyPC are nothing but crapware that do more harm than good. And yes, get rid of McAfee while you’re at it since it uses up more resources and slows your system. Some of the best anti-virus and firewall programs are free and work in harmony with your OS rather than doing a hostile takeover (Norton, McAffee, etc).
And btw, that “sump.exe” is not 51k but 51 megabytes and is part of that SpeedUpMyPC program. No need for it. And I can pretty much guarantee it’s McAfee that’s slowing down you page loads and causing Windows to creep along.
I recommend running the excellent and free CCleaner (for safe registry and junk file cleaning), Avast! antivirus/anti-malware suite (free version) and the Comodo Firewall (Firewall only, not the whole suite–Avast! takes care of the rest). However, you’ll have to uninstall all those other programs and using the built-in Windows uninstaller isn’t good enough as it leaves a bunch of registry entries and junk folders and files behind. So you’ll need another excellent (and free) program called “Revo Uninstaller” which will do a thorough job of removing programs.*
I’ll agree that Vista is probably the worst OS MS ever put out. XP is a good, solid system but is rapidly becoming obsolete and Windows 7 is excellent. I ran Windows 7 on a 7 year old PC and it ran as well if not better than XP did on the same machine (nice and speedy). And I ran all 3 of those programs I recommended above on both XP and Win7
*It’s not that simple though. You know who I am and you know I wouldn’t steer you wrong. Email me at the usual address if you’re interested in correcting these issues.
I notice your process monitor shows you have FOUR instances of Chrome running simultaneously, using up about 100MB of system memory, not to mention CPU resources and some disk activity not shown in that window. Depending on how much RAM that PC has, this could be a significant hit on performance.
Also, don’t use crapware like RegistryCleaner and SpeedUpMyPC. They contribute to the problem they supposedly fix. And ditching McAfee (which is also using upwards of 100MB of RAM) for a lighter-weight A/V product like AVG or Avast would help out a lot.
It’s hard to know exactly what things are creating so many svchosts, so you shouldn’t kill them, but I’d bet that several of them are associated with those three apps and are just listeners/phone-home services for them.