Keeping a clean machine – so difficult

I’ve recently started afresh with a completely clean new machine. The aim of this machine is that it will eventually become my production machine.

I’m only adding things to this machine that I actually use. I’ve not made any pre-judgment on what I use, I have decided that I will start with a blank machine and add things as I need them.

My aim with this has been twofold:

• I wanted to see what software I actually use – not just what I think I use.
• I wanted to see how long it would be before I collected something that I will never use.

Today I received the first piece of software that I will never use – Adobe Photoshop Album Start Edition. How did I get it? I installed Adobe Reader. Just like that I now have software taking up resources on my device, and not just disk space, it also loads Adobe Photo Downloader. 2MB of memory stolen, just like that. I am now kicking myself. I nearly didn’t go with Adobe Reader, I nearly installed the Foxit Reader.

And now, to uninstall this software (that I never wanted in the first place) I have to close down all of my browser sessions because presumably it’s installed some extensions in there that I will never use either. And for some reason, that is bizarre in the extreme, I’m also having to close my Lotus Notes session.

This free software that I never wanted is proving to be very expensive (in terms  of my lost productivity) indeed.

last night I spent an hour at a friends house cleaning up a PC that had collected so much tat and rubbish that it was becoming unstable.None of the software was malicious, I’m sure that it would all be useful to someone, but it was all tat. Is there any wonder that people get to the point where they hate PC’s.

It’s like junk-mail, only worse and like junk-mail it needs an industry answer. In the UK we have a service that allows people to opt out of most forms of junk-mail call Mail Preference. Organisations that continue to send junk-mail get heavily fined. Perhaps we should start to do the same for software.