The First Foray

Welcome to Digital Discontent.

I'm starting this blog to rant, essentially, about the little annoyances I run into on a daily basis as a computer tech. Consider it therapy perhaps.

Item 1 Description of Situation in which our Blood Pressure Rises:
You decide you want to grab a new shiny program, you navigate the sites half-assed attempt at a design. Halfway down the page, between ads for their $400 version that only differs from the free version by way of a talking dog that assists you, you finally find gold. A nice big beautiful download link... You click in anticipation, binary goodness is nearly yours.

You notice, as the download starts, that it finishes a bit too quickly. Sure you've got broadband, but that was just a little too fast, oh its only 800k, well maybe they're good at compression, or really good coders that don't waste space, who knows, you've got what you came for, mission accomplished!!!.

So you click the exe to install. A beautiful new interface comes up on your screen... and proceeds to start downloading the program you thought you just downloaded.

WTH

Who gets my size 13 steel toe to the head? WHY DO YOU THINK I NEED TO DOWNLOAD A PROGRAM TO DOWNLOAD A PROGRAM!!!!!! Just give me the whole thing at the beginning, sure I live in BFE, but I have about 6 meg down on my dsl connection, I can handle it, its ok. And to top it off, if the downloader actually has a speed indicator, its usually running at about 1/2 to 1/4 of the speed I can get from any other server.

In short, you're wasting my time, and throttling my download, unless you have some sort of resume option, or can speed up my download, just give me the dang setup file.

Item 2 List of Offenders:
Avast, AVG, Yahoo, Microsoft, Adobe

Item 3 Suggested course of action:
... I'd say boycott them, but I actually like Avast. And well, most of these are free.