Computer Repair Experts in Phoenix, Arizona. my PC Techs Presents:

Today marks one more time of a thousand where I’ve had to fix a computer having major problems with Norton Antivirus. What’s wrong with the people over at Symantec? They make a fortune from poor computer users under threat of virus, spyware, worms and other nasties, certainly enough money to hire competent programmers. So why is it that every release of their client virus software for the past 10 years has been bloated and mal-functional? I am starting to wonder who’s worse here, the virus writers or the people who write and sell bloatware that crashes your computer and forces you to pay them more money to make it right (see below).

Just today I talked to this poor guy who couldn’t even access the internet because his norton antivirus/internet security suite would hang on boot. He couldn’t even remove Norton in Safe Mode (they don’t allow uninstall in safe mode). After spending a few hours on the phone with low-level Symantec technical support, he spent 4 more hours waiting for various tech support ‘fixes and ideas’ from an individual who’s actual name was kilambackenran (his nickname was also kilambackenran). Not only had their software ruined his computer, they then made sure that his day was wasted on the phone, outsourced to cheap foreign labor. The fantastic advice at the end of the day that was dished out from India to this guy to fix his anti-virus? Uninstall his current version, then pay to upgrade to the latest version! That’s right, his computer would not work properly again unless he paid them more money for a product that was already paid up for another year.

Here’s a story that is all too common with Symantec. Every time something goes wrong with their software (which is all the time) they tell you to upgrade and give them more money in the process. It’s an interesting business model. Generate a steady stream of money flowing into the company by releasing a product that fails so badly you MUST pay for the upgrade. Why do people continue to put up with this shoddy workmanship? Imagine buying a high quality wood table from me for your home, only to take it home and the legs all fall off the day later. What would you think if I then charged you to put the legs back on?

To make a long story short, I told this guy the same as I will tell anyone. Dump Norton. Uninstall it. If you are having trouble uninstalling it, visit their website and use the norton software removal tool. Then stop paying people to write buggy code! There are very good, stable and just as effective tools out there that will get the job done for free. Such as AVG Free Antivirus. Download it here and be forever free from Symantec.

Now you can! Google has just unveiled a new service, “Hot Trends”, located here.

Unlike previous top 10 or top 100 google search rankings, which are usually just for an entire year, this list is updated every day allowing you to see (in real time) what search terms are currently the most popular. This has got to be the most useful tool ever made available to help find out what’s hot at any given moment. It also gives a peek into what the majority of people are thinking about.. Right now as of writing this blog it seems that a majority of items in the top 100 have to do with some kind of television program whether it’s American Idol, dancing with the stars, or the bachelor!

But there’s hope for the smart masses! Other searches include Oregonlive, I lean like a chola and Lybrel. OK, so maybe not… 🙂

According to this article, more than 90% of computer users have some form of spyware installed on their computer. Guess what, that number is very likely true! Many of the computers that I’ve come in contact had some form of spyware or another and in every case the user had no idea that it was there. Spyware can infect your PC and you may never even know it, simply by browsing to an infected web page on the internet or installing a program that doesn’t warn you of the hidden code that comes with it. And usually each piece of spyware installed to your machine will cause your computer to perform poorly, the more you have installed the slower it will run. Spyware can cripple your computer in a number of ways from making it boot slower, making applications no longer function as expected and making every-day tasks take longer to execute. And that’s all in addition to the theft of your privacy, which was already bad enough.

If you don’t already have a spyware scanning tool I highly recommend you download one today or consult a professional to help you keep your computer system secure.

ColdFusion is a pretty cool web development language. It’s purpose is to provide a way for a website to integrate with a database server and to provide database information to web pages. This adds an extra level of functionality to website forms, reports and applications. For the longest time, Macromedia ColdFusion was stuck on version 7, even long after MacroMedia was purchased by Adobe. ColdFusion has undergone some criticism lately as well, having made a “Top 10 list” of technologies that have become obsolete. I’d argue with that statement. Sure, ColdFusion isn’t found on most of the major “paid website host” services. But Dreamweaver is the #1 selling web development platform, and ColdFusion is a large part of that platform. I don’t see ColdFusion going away any time soon.

So to me, it’s pretty good news today when I read that ColdFusion was being upgraded to version 8. It will be very interesting to see what Adobe has done here. I can’t think of a single programming language developed by Adobe that I’ve ever used or even imagine one that I could enjoy using. Macromedia did such a great job with ColdFusion, by making it easy to use and easy to learn, that Adobe has a lot stacked up against them. I can only hope that they left much of the core of ColdFusion 7 in place and only added functionality and fixed bugs. That would be enough for me to consider an upgrade for ColdFusion enabled servers that I use.

I sat in a discussion recently with a guy (no names) who tried and tried until blue in the face to convince me that I should embrace his .NET website platform (that works on Internet Explorer 7 ONLY). Sorry pal, no such luck. And this isn’t the only time I’ve been involved with people who insist that their websites or web products are great despite the fact that you can’t use it at all without Internet Explorer. Can someone lead me to the rock where all of these poor people crawled out from under? It’s time to remove the rock and liberate these trapped souls, giving them entry back to the real world!

It was a growing trend amongst professional web designers starting in 2004 to insist that websites were designed in a way that would support all browsers. Not only Internet Explorer, but Mozilla, Opera and Safari as well. This was done for good reason. Mobile devices began to appear that could read web pages, none of them used Internet Explorer to render pages. More users began to purchase Apple Macintosh computers – this group, while small, comprises enough people to warrant the cost of making your website compatible with all browsers. Also at this time, Mozilla was starting to starting to grow and gain a descent underground following. These reasons alone were enough reason to avoid IE dependent website code like the plague, but there was more. The most important catalyst behind the shift away from Internet Explorer websites was a single idea, not tied to any single technology. People began to realize that it just made sense to build a page that everyone would be able to read and to use, no matter how they came to the page. From a business perspective, you want to make your product available to as many people as possible, not just people on one platform with one piece of software. From that single idea an entirely new set of technologies began to emerge that took advantage of standard web programming languages working cross-platform on the internet.

Fast forward to 2007. Everyone has had 3 years to read about the shift away from IE only web pages. Magazines have touted it time after time, professional web design forums and whitepapers have talked about it. Even raw data itself seems to support this shift and validate it. The growth of Mozilla Firefox has been phenomenal, most people have no concept that this browser has come as far as it has. Already on major websites on the internet, anywhere from 30% to 60% of the visitors are using Firefox to browse the web pages. That’s a large number of people! To insist that people use internet explorer only on your website potentially alienates or at least aggravates 1/3rd of your customers who would prefer to use a different browser. And it completely eliminates the other users who have no recourse to use Internet Explorer, those users browsing with an Operating System other than Windows.

Which leads me to my final point. Dell has recently put forward plans to offer computer systems pre-loaded with Linux Ubuntu. This is an operating system that doesn’t have Internet Explorer installed. WalMart also has plans to offer Linux enabled operating systems. And with the huge failure that is Windows Vista forcing people away from Microsoft products to Linux solutions in record numbers, the doors to the floodgate are already opening. I can see a future in the not-too-distant future where not only 30-40% of people on the internet using something other than Internet Explorer, they aren’t even using Microsoft Windows and thus have no Internet Explorer available to them at all.

For that reason, I’ll have to tell those people trying to push Internet Explorer only products off on me to please go somewhere else. I think they’re selling a shallow grave. Microsoft had their time and the future belongs to open standards, Mozilla Firefox and Linux.