10 most annoying programs on your computer

Techrepublic has listed 10 most annoying programs to a computer user, both on the system and on the internet.

I have slightly changed the list and put them in the ascending order of the degree of annoyance. Though the intensity of pain in the ass that these bugs produce is purely subjective, there is no gainsaying that there exist some specimens of terror in digital form which inflict universally on the hapless users.

10. Flash [#]

Flash is a good program. There is nothing to replace Flash movies – SWF or FLV. In fact the Youtube revolution has been made possible only by Flash. And Flash embedded players have ushered in the phenomenon of podcasting. In fact your cyber life would be thrown light years backwards with out Flash.

But having said that, there is no forgiving truckloads of Flash movies in intro pages of web sites. They trickle like molasses in December!

9. Yahoo and Google Toolbars

Real annoying stuff. Adds no value but occupy my browser’s real estate. All the icons that are needed are already perched on the standard toolbars of my browser. Then why this special toolbar, Vanity? But look at the guys offering them! They have nothing to do with either Yahoo! or Google, but still they offer FREE install of toolbars! Good samaritans? Phew!

8. Adobe Reader

• Too bloated for a simple job of reading a .pdf file.
• Frequent updates
• Worthless and stupid addons offered to be installed by the unwary
• Stone-age search algorithm
• No real improvement between versions

7. Pre-installed software bundles

Poor things! Yes, those suckers who buy PCs and notebooks with pre-installed software by the vendor. Nine out of ten the programs are trial versions. They stop working once you start trying to use them right earnestly, or, start nagging you to register.

I read somewhere that Sony demands money to remove unwanted software that came pre-installed in their computers! There should be a law against such restrictive practices. It is your money and you should be the master to choose what junk you throw inside your computer!

6. Windows Update

• Update or perish! What with the world full of horror stories of computers getting hacked and marauded, you obey the command from the big W with a 3-finger salute! But the update procedure is too annoying indeed.
• You thought you had just finished installing one set of half-a-dozen updates. No here is a new set waiting. Update and then alone you can shut down!
• You actually don’t know what you are doing and what vulnerabilities are being patched. You just let Windows take over your computer and start praying!

And here comes the punch line from Techrepublic:

We’ve been kind and not talked about Vista.

5. RealPlayer

I’ll just reproduce the Techrepublic’s eloquent and candid observation on Realplayer:

If this software turned up at your door, you’d call the police. RealPlayer commits just about every sin in the book, sprinkling itself across your desktop and offering ‘Free games!’. It installs a ‘Message Center’ that tells you about microcelebrities. There is more advertising embedded in the application than used to be on the front page of The Times. And you just wanted to stream The Archers.

There are a few alternatives for Real Player in the market, mostly of less deadweight bereft of annoyances. But, why bother? Forget RealPlayer, we are in MP3 era of Winamps and VLC players!

4. Internet Explorer

You have done a beautiful looking web page, true to the standards, XHTML and all that jazz, conforming to the CSS rules to the last T. But it wont show up right on the IE. Why? Just that IE doesn’t accept your standards, to wit, widely accepted standards and be compliant. IE has its own rules of compliance and rendering and you have to code for it. That is why you find [if IE] set of CSS rules, to salve M$ ego.

It is criminal that many web sites are made to be seen only in IE, but not by Firefox, Opera or Safari. They are losing a good deal of potential customers for sure.

But just you wait till Firefox takes over the earth. The day is very much round the corner!

3. Apple

• You can, in a weak moment tolerate Apple Mac, or even Jobs, for that matter. But not the gargantuan amazon of a mother-in-law, yes, you guessed it right! I am referring to the most wicked program on the space, the indomitable Itunes! “iTunes is a music player the size of a fat-bottomed whale that gobbles resources like krill”, muses Techrepublic story
• I know, you are sore with me for listing Itunes over Quicktime. Have a heart, Quicktime movies are small and cute! May be, but the player is not cool.
• You can’t forgive Apple’s sin for pushing an update down our throats almost 3 times a week
• And they may be something else masquerading as updates. It may contain Safari being bunged in surreptitiously as an update when you have nothing to do anything with that name.

2. Gmail

Perhaps the buggiest beta the cyberworld ever seen. It has loads of javascript that dumps itself into your browser, slowing down everything in its path. Besides, the Ajax updating of the page happens, wait a minute, does not happen may a time, freezing your browser in the process. All you get enigmatic error numbers. And you were cursing Windows all along!

And when it says, “Chat not loaded. Your network has a problem”, it simply means Gmail is buggy, as vouched by Gmail’s help page itself, which deciphers the cryptic message as a problem with the functioning of the javascript libraries and suggests an age old remedy of refreshing the browser!

And while I was at it, this beauty came along just now:

Gmail is perhaps the worst attachment handler in the free web-based email service arena. Attachments just do not get delivered. It hates compressed files. Then what use is 1Gb, I wonder. Now that Yahoo!, AOL and many such sites offering unlimited storage, Gmail has lost its sheen.

1. Norton Antivirus ***

No other program causes so much of pain as this monster. True, it has a bigger cousin which is more virulent – viz, Norton SytemWorks. Techrepublic is succinct when it avers, “If ever a class of software deserved to be cast into the lower reaches of Hell and run on Satan’s own desktop, it is this.” Performance- sapping, space-hogging, noisy, irritating and prone to introducing just as many problems as they purport to solve, these horrible, ineffective, expensive lumps of digital thuggery keep entire platoons of support engineers in business and home users in tears. And on top of it, it will refuse to go away – yes, you can’t remove it – uninstall, registry-clean, clean-sweep – nothing doing. You’ll have to employ customized 3rd party programs to flush this malignant tumor out of the system. So beware, keep anything starting with a capital “N” at arm’s length!

*** – – 3 Star annoyance level!
[#] – – Flash is almost getting deprecated as a tool for rendering videos on the web, to be replaced by HTML5, thanks to the path-breaking efforts of Steve Job’s apple!

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