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First, it sounds like these unindicted criminals want to get into what used to be and may still be called “human factors engineering” in the defense consulting ‘biz; that was once my world in another lifetime. And, being Microsoft, they intend to utterly dominate the market and squash all competition, bringing them under heel to lick the refuse from their boots.
Second, I’ve been meaning to post forever about my horror story with these bastards. For reasons that were utterly cosmic in their stupidity and which I will probably never understand, I upgraded to Internet Explorer 7 on a whim near the end of last summer from IE 6.
The first thing that went wrong was the sudden inability of my anti-virus program to go get daily updates, and my spyware program didn’t work properly either (both AVG, good products, and both free – I had to buy the spyware program to fix one issue). Not much of a problem for the moment, though it was tedious after awhile.
Next, I started getting messages from MS that IE 7 updates were available, so I installed a security update which completely hosed my browser. I removed the update and the browser worked OK, but then I kept getting the update message and (again, being MS) it eventually updated whether I wanted it to or not, and I had to keep constantly deleting the update to keep the browser working.
So I got my tech guy into the picture and I told him I wanted Mozilla Firefox (which I should have had all along), so he told me to go download it and delete IE 7. I installed MF and deleted IE 7, and it completely killed my browser to the point where I could do NOTHING. I tried to go back and install IE 6 over it, but see, IE 7 leaves trace files all over the place that utterly corrupt your registry, program files, system files…you name it (it thusly refused to install IE 6 since it still recognized IE 7). They do this to allow Internet updates to other MS products even if you can’t get online yourself (the IE 7 “backbone” – funny, but as near as I can recall, the point of the lawsuit in the ‘90s was to prevent this). So I couldn’t upgrade to MF, couldn’t go back to IE 6…couldn’t do jack.
The answer? I needed to go buy a whole new hard drive and use the existing one as a slave – my tech guy managed to hide or delete all of the IE 7 trace files that he could on the old drive. And on the new drive, I had IE 6 installed – should probably have gotten MF, but I had both time and cost issues that made IE 6 the better option for now.
Let’s see – new hard drive was $100, new student version of Office was $149 (couldn’t get an open source presentation graphics package that worked), $180 for my tech guy, time and aggravation of setting up and reinstalling all former programs (lost Front Page, but I can deal with that), and I’m only now getting back to my “pre IE7 status quo” - all of this hit the fan in mid December last year.
Lesson? Buy Mozilla Firefox from “the jump,” among other things. And I would ask that you remember this and realize what a prick Gates is while someone else alleges that he’s actually some kind of a humanitarian.
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