House Numbers

OK heres a different rant, not only to PC engineers but to anyone who has to find a house in the dark:
I know my eyes are bad (they told me it would make me go blind)(looking at a screen all day that is) but how can I see a house number cruising down a dark road if you put it inside a porch? Or what about no house number at all? Or what about black numbers on a dark green door? Or what about three houses in a row all with number 1 on them (yes Im not joking, it happened tonight)? Get the message?

If I have to come and sort out your computer at night, at least put your house number in fluorescent letters with a spotlight on it for me!

How many icons in your system tray?

In the bottom fight hand corner of your screen is a thing called the System Tray. It gives you icons of some of the small applications that start when Windows starts, well those that want to declare themselves anyway. Have a look, and if you`ve got more than five or six.......its too many.

I was doing some research yesterday, and I downloaded a couple of small innocent programs from reputable sites and they ran well enough, did their job and I thought I might use them again so left them on my home laptop. When the machine restarted it hung, was slow, jerky mouse etc.

PANIC!!! Me, a computer expert with viruses? Turns out not, these little programs inserted another few little startup applets which either interfered with something else, or just plain confused my poor PC. Many scans later, and a trip to Start/run/msconfig/startup tab later, I foundand took off the culprits. OK here comes the rant......

WHY do software writers continue to put in these stupid little startup applets WITHOUT EVEN ASKING ? I wouldnt mind if they actually did something! Even F****** MS Office puts in a quick start which does bugger-all. Add up the memory used in ten little startup programs (not even counting the extra time it takes to load them on startup) and its enough to drag your computer back into the nineties.

So the moral is , check regularly, and stop the rot of wasted startup apps. Nuff said.

Not too much software please

So theres a lot of free software out there, some of it fantastic, some of it terrible. But why do people want all of it on their computers and yet only use about three programs in total?

I can understand wanting to try a few things out, but when youve had your fill, for gods sake, uninstall it. Wheb I get computers in for repair and I look through the list of installed programs, I always ask "do you know what that is?" or "do you use that program?", the reply is always.......NO.

Try it, but if you dont use it uninstall it. Oh and by the way those free screensavers come with adware, what a surprise!

Do I have to explain why? Emailme if you dont know