Stupid pieces of software

[Eri]

Incoming rant about itunes and it's ridiculousness.

First off, anytime itunes wants to update, it wants me to reboot the computer after it's all done. Why does it need to do this?

If that weren't bad enough, You can't even install the newest firmware on your phone or ipod unless you have the newest itunes. No reason for this.

Next we have...the firmware updates. It's bad enough they are almost always 5-600 megabytes, but that isn't the worst part. After it finally downloads after 30 minutes due to size and their slow servers, if for some reason your firewall or something else interferes it claims "cannot update due to blahblah". This isn't even considering patch days when they launch a patch, their servers become overloaded and it spits this message out at you multiple times.

It proceeds to immediately and without consent delete everything you just spent your half hour downloading. If you want to do it again, hope you enjoy redownloading it all over again, and wasting your time, all over again. Don't even get me started on the rest of itunes.

Know of any other stupid software?

 

[Tharwen]

Skype! Why the hell does a piece of software designed to sit in the background and do nothing use up 150MB of my precious RAM?

The irritating thing is that there's no other way to be ready to receive calls on it!

But yeah... iTunes has a completely retarded updating/backing up/syncing system.

 

[Rednog]

Windows 7, for some reason when I installed it, it decided that it should automatically choose its mode to be defaulted to Power Saver, it's a freaking desktop not a laptop, there is no battery to drain, who in the blue hell doesn't want their desktop to run at its potential?!
I was so confused the first day or so when my computer would randomly power down when I walked away for 5 or so minutes. This got insanely frustrating because I got my 360 rigged to my PC and it kept powering down the 360 since the PC wasn't directly in use.

Also every other program that automatically decides that because you installed it, it should automatically start-up when the computer is turned on, because we all want turning on our computer to take 10 minutes.

 

[Eri]

Weeeeell, this thread died quick.

 

[FortheLegion]

Oh man I hate Itunes. I hate going anywhere near it. It makes me so very very angry.
Thankfully I no longer own an Ipod

 

[Christemo]

i would say Norton, but that would be too simple.

Skype is pretty crap. it can´t register my microphone, and i have tried every configuration in my control panel. this disallows me to use the otherwise decent program that has a very low person-to-person delay.

iTunes deleted my jailbreak

 

[Ghhostface]

Do games count as software?

if so



Any non-ps1 crash bandicoot game.

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

Ahhh, iTunes. I hate how buying music off of that site sometimes isn't even able to tranfer onto your iDevice! YOU have to go through the tedious process of converting all the songs.

 

[QuadFish]

Pretty much every anti-virus I've ever used. Norton 360 ended up using so much of my precious 1GB RAM that it caused TF2 to slow down, have micro-freezes and eventually totally lock up after 15 minutes of play. On top of that, anyone who has had to organise a wireless network with printers etc. will tell you how badly a firewall like Norton's can mess with you.

Then I used Trend Micro for a bit, but it treats you like an ignorant 5-year-old, constantly reminding you not to use the net before you parents set up parental controls and going "yeah, I totally restored that urgent quarantined file" before subtly re-quarantining the restored file and flipping you the bird.

At the moment, my OEM version of Kaspersky looks good. It treats you like an intelligent human being, runs with little memory-hogging and gets the job done.

And while I won't go into a rant about iTunes, I just want to know why the hell there are 3 background processes (iTunesHelper.exe, iPodService.exe and AppleMobileDeviceService.exe) going all the time. And ever since the newest update, that last one just keeps coming back like a zombie.

 

[tharglet]

Norton 360 ended up using so much of my precious 1GB RAM that it caused TF2 to slow down, have micro-freezes and eventually totally lock up after 15 minutes of play. On top of that, anyone who has had to organise a wireless network with printers etc. will tell you how badly a firewall like Norton's can mess with you.

Sometimes I wonder if Norton IS a virus.... only had it once, and it was terrible. Seen it on other's machines and it is still bad.

 

[Vie]

Norton is so bad that at the IT room I used to work for we had a tool to remove it off any computers that were brought in.

iTunes drives me up the wall, every single thing about that program is arse backwards and made as annoying and inconvenient as possible. Whats particularly galling is the fact its a lot easier to get stuff onto the iPod from Linux than from Windows - because the windows programs all require iTunes to be installed in the first place.

 

[Patrick Dare]

Spoiler: snip

Incoming rant about itunes and it's ridiculousness.

First off, anytime itunes wants to update, it wants me to reboot the computer after it's all done. Why does it need to do this?

If that weren't bad enough, You can't even install the newest firmware on your phone or ipod unless you have the newest itunes. No reason for this.

Next we have...the firmware updates. It's bad enough they are almost always 5-600 megabytes, but that isn't the worst part. After it finally downloads after 30 minutes due to size and their slow servers, if for some reason your firewall or something else interferes it claims "cannot update due to blahblah". This isn't even considering patch days when they launch a patch, their servers become overloaded and it spits this message out at you multiple times.

It proceeds to immediately and without consent delete everything you just spent your half hour downloading. If you want to do it again, hope you enjoy redownloading it all over again, and wasting your time, all over again. Don't even get me started on the rest of itunes.

Know of any other stupid software?

Hahahaha, that's hilarious. As soon as I saw this thread and clicked on it my first thought was "itunes" but I didn't expect that to be what the rant was about. Luckily I don't really use it much anymore because I use winamp for listening purposes and only use itunes for putting songs on my ipod which I've been doing on linux for awhile anyways. I thought itunes had gotten better but I guess not. I remember when I got my first ipod itunes would just crash most of the time when I plugged in my ipod. I hated it, loathed it. One of the nice things about Linux is you almost never have to restart because of updates, though I still have to use itunes to update ipod firmware but that's practically never. I've also been having problems with google chrome but for some reason the adds on the escapist cause problems with firefox so I'm forced to use this for the time being.

Edit: I don't know if games technically count as software or not but Mass Effect freezes my entire computer to the point that I have to do a hard reboot and I know a lot of people have had all kinds of various problems with it.

 

[QuadFish]

Sometimes I wonder if Norton IS a virus....

Well, once I removed it, TF2 ran fantastically. It was definitely a worthwhile trade-off if you ask me.

 

[ham and red bull]

I used to hate steam, mostly because some games wouldn't run on my pc, turns out it was my video card. Now I love it! Have you seen the amazing sales?!

I hate the ipod touch youtube app, most of the videos crash after a couple of minutes.

 

[Buzz Killington_v1legacy]

The thing is, Norton used to be great. They made small, fast utilities that did things users needed, and did them well. Then Symantec bought them out, and everything went to shit.

 

[thenumberthirteen]

+1 for iTunes. I hear it's great on Mac, but the PC version is really buggy and crashes all the time. Even when it's working it's too damn slow. If I didn't have an iPhone I wouldn't have it installed.

 

[teqrevisited]

Mcafee. That thing just didn't die. It was like the Terminator of anti-virus software.

"Do you wish to turn off all alerts? Y/N" "Yes"

A couple of hours later...

DING DING. Mcafee pops up, blocking part of the screen, meaning if I click there it minimizes the damn application to go to that bloody thing telling me something I already knew and telling me it despite the fact I told it to sod off and die. /rant

God I hate Mcafee.

 

[DazZ.]

Skype is terrible, still wonder why the people I speak to on there use it.
TS3/Vent/Mumble are much better for voip, with dedi servers and a push to talk option.

Also iTunes, using Foobar instead at the moment, love the customisability tiny size and extensions available.

 

[AwesomeFerret]

I'm rather tempted to type "Windows Vista. End Thread." but I wont, because tat contributes nothing to the discussion. I really don't know why Vista has decided, in its infinite wisdom, to make my laptop crash when I dare to play Minecraft and TF2, and anything else that it thinks is using too much memory, or why it decides to spontaneously over heat and then cool down again at the worst possible times (read- while balanced on my crotch). Before I got Vista, I thought that it couldn't be as bad as people said it was. Now I know differently. Its much worse. Any one else's Vista this bad?