I just had to fix a problem on a computer with Windows Live Messenger unexpectedly closing due to DEP violation, and guess what the problem was - Acer's eDataSecurity Management tool was doing something screwy with it. I gotta give them credit for providing a fix to the problem (problem and solution here), but why do problems like these happen time and time again? And even when the software works, it nearly always seems to be some clunky prototype someone was paid peanuts to do.
It annoys any IT guy to no end the amount of crap desktop/laptop manufacturers preload on their systems. The first thing I do for the machines we do at work is unload all that crap, or do a complete OS restore without those bits. I'd be interested to see how many people actually use the crap that's generally on them. Do they really think they're adding value? Who the hell buys desktops/laptops based on the additional crap it has on it?
That crap is generally unsupported too, written by the new guy in the office with the shit tasks list, and as long as it worked the day he wrote it, it's assumed to be rock-solid and will work anywhere for eternity. Great.
If they want to add value by preloading software, do it well, do it unobtrusively, give us the option if whether or not to use it, and respect the fact that I don't want it scattered everywhere on my system (and also good Windows programming guidelines, i.e. don't write stuff to the Program Files folder!).
Motherboard manufacturers are repeat offenders too. Here's a screen dump of my MSI mobo's temperature monitoring app:
Why do they always look so ridiculous? This isn't the first motherboard I've seen with a monitoring app like this - Gigabyte, Asus, Soltek all have apps that look like this or worse. Is there some kind of competition between mobo manufacturers to try and make the ridiculous-looking monitoring app ever?
Looks aside, I thank my lucky stars every time this thing loads up and doesn't make my computer spontaneously restart after a few minutes. You have no idea how nervous I get when I have to use their utility to do a BIOS update...
Many peripheral makers aren't much better either. Here's one from my Dvico FusionHDTV card.
Don't get me started on how unintuitive it is (reservation? automatic date maker? where's the bloody close button?) - I'm just thankful it works. It took them years to get the software to this working state - the software I got with it originally was unworkable to say the least. In the mean time, I got all sorts of weird 'UI enhancements' from the following versions, but the software still did all sorts of weird things until they picked up their game a bit recently. Yet I still have no confidence in pressing the 'record TV' button, and dread the day I have to reinstall it on another computer.
A friend's Linksys CIT200 Skype phone is the same - when that app is loading, everything in XP freezes until it's done.
The pain isn't on and off though. It's full on. There seems to be some implicit rule that they all have to have as much crap as they can get away with running on your computer on startup. That MSI program above automatically loads on startup after install. Others like Logitech, add innocent things like an update checker (I've lost count of the number of update checkers I've had to disable - I wish Windows had the Linux package system sometimes, even with its annoying quirks) to the startup list. Others add more annoying things like services that are useless unless the desktop app is running, while the more evil ones add apps that sit in the task bar quietly chewing up CPU and RAM until your computer slows to a crawl.
Toshiba's Bluetooth stack is a serious offender here - unlike the Microsoft stack, it requires an app for each BT protocol to be loaded on startup, each of them taking up valuable resources that could be shared, even if my BT is switched off. In fact, while I haven't looked on other laptops lately, Toshiba is a serial offender to startup apps - my laptop had over 10 apps attributable to Toshiba loading on startup when I first got it, some useful, others not so. Regardless - there must be a better way to manage all these functions without all this useless overload.
Why is the software component nearly always an afterthought when it comes to the overall product? Is it because its not physical therefore it doesn't matter? Or are the hardware guys somewhat superior, and the software guys are just minimum-paid dropkicks hired to build software because the company had to? In most cases, the software is as important as the hardware is, so it doesn't matter if you have awesome hardware but your software sucks - bad user experience overall (and unfortunately Windows cops most of the blame due to the nature of the bugs, and hence the hardware manufacturers have no incentive to fix it).
Whatever it is, if I'm ever in the hardware device industry, I pledge to give software the attention it deserves 