The day they invent better idiot-proof software, we can rest assured that a
better idiot will come along.

What's even more fun than being asked to fix the neighborhood computers? Why,
it's being asked to fix various relatives computers! Do they really think we
don't know where those 1-900 dialer programs came from? ;-)
-rich

:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
in response to
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As you can imagine, my somewhat double career leaves me with one circle of
friends among the technologically elite, but another almost entirely devoid of
basic computer troubleshooting skills. That means I get to help clean up from
viruses and things from end - user pc's from time to time. It happens
frequently enough that I have a special LAN segment just for these PC's to be
plugged into, with its own firewall protecting the rest of my machines. These
are the PC's that sit unprotected on cable modems, are used for music sharing,
porn surfing, live gaming, and almost always have Outlook Express (aka The
Microsoft Virus & Worm Distribution Engine -- MVWDE) running full speed. I
cleared one the other day -- and typical of what I see when I look at the
machines -- it had 10 different "start-up" pop up applications, many in the
system tray. Starting the machine was all it took to be deluged with pop up
porn advertisements. It had more than two dozen "spyware" infestations, and 3
different virus/worm variants infesting 28 files. To give the user some credit,
he'd brought it to visit me because his Norton AV had spotted a virus, and he
couldn't get it cleaned. The directions from Symantec included restarting the
machine in safe mode -- something the user had never heard of -- and manually
editing the registry after removing the entries. Now, to give the guys at
Symantec some credit -- I use their product and consider it the best on the
market for A.V. Still, how do we, the I.T. professionals out there, expect an
end-user to cope with these things? He'd also installed Zone-Alarm -- another
good product, and one that I use on my laptop -- but wasn't able to figure out
which things were threats and which were legitimate because all ZA shows is the
executable name, not even the path to that file. I showed him how to find the
location of a file on the drive, and use that information to help figure out if
its a legitimate net access, and also how to use the checkbox on ZA so that it
remembers that file next time it tries. We, the I.T. industry, need to realize
how badly we've dropped the ball here on usability. We all want the "internet
connected society" to work -- but we're going to have to do better. If we can't
find user-acceptable was to stop these virus and worm attacks, if we can't find
user-acceptable ways to keep spam out of our childrens' mailboxes, the end
users are going to pull the network cable out of the wall and send us all
packing.

Your article raised a few interesting points, most importantly the bad
usability of the systems we nowadays push to end users.

I personally limit very strictly who I help during my spare time. Reason? There
are reasonably priced commercial resources available for my friends to contact.
Plus, once you touch it, it's yours, i.e. every time something fails in that
system it is because you've done something to it.

In a similar vain, I refrain from asking medical advice from my in-law MDs,
legal advice from my mother-in-law (who is a lawyer), free help from my uncle
(who is a plumber). After a days work I don't thing they'd appreciate more work.

So, why home computer users shouldn't buy the help? They're already buying
somebody to do house cleaning and maintain their car. Why would computers be
any different?