Symphonious

I'm not sure there are many platforms that make installing software more painful than Windows. Linux used to present a worthy challenge but apt-get and similar systems are so common and so comprehensive now that it's generally smooth. Some of the main annoyances are:

• Clicking next, next, next, next just to get the install started. Are all those screens really needed? Couldn't we at least skip the welcome screen?
• Icons, icons everywhere and not a scrap of user control. I'm looking at you NetBeans - I didn't tell you to put an icon on my desktop. And you Thunderbird, why the heck do you feel compelled to add yourself to my quick launch bar? Windows Media Player does the same thing. Rack off all of you. You can put a shortcut in the Start menu under programs and that's it.
• License keys. Is there anything more futile? Why waste my time with them when I can just use the same key on multiple machines to pirate the software anyway?
• Uninstallers and readme's in the start menu. Add/Remove Programs handles uninstalling, just give me the product and get rid of the extra crap in the menu. You'll probably wind up with just one icon left and you can get rid of the folder altogether. Kudos to Microsoft for leading the way on this - Virtual PC has no folder and Office has just the programs in it's folder.
• No auto-sort in the start menu. Is it really that hard to just keep things sorted by name without me having to do it?
• Unlock toolbar, resize quick launch area, lock toolbar, discover the size has changed because the dividers aren't shown anymore, repeat the process until you get it to the right size. Anyone heard of size to fit?

I think that covers most of the issues I've had. It makes me appreciate how nice OS X apps are to install, even if they do hide the applications folder.

A few days ago I did a clean reinstall of my Windows machine to clean up the mess of partitions and OS boot menus that had developed from trying out different OS's. While reinstalling drivers, I discovered that my computer came with Norton Internet Security so I figured I may as well install it1, I also discovered an nVidia firewall tool and installed that too. Then I started downloading programs to install - firefox, Java etc. Everything I downloaded was corrupt. I disabled both firewalls and everything was still getting corrupted, even though I could download them on my Mac just fine. Even JavaScript files and applets were being corrupted while downloading.

Eventually, I uninstalled both the nVidia firewall tool and Norton Internet Security and suddenly all my downloads worked fine. Now I can kind of understand problems arising from having two internet security apps filtering and messing with downloads at the same time, but I can't understand why they would still cause problems when they were supposed to be disabled. If you're going to mess with my downloads there are some key things you need to do:

1. Tell me that you're changing the contents of my download. Don't do this through a pop-up dialog, that will drive me nuts - a task bar icon would do.
2. Give me the option to disable it temporarily or permanently and actually disable.
3. Give me a way to undo the changes you made to my downloads without having to redownload them. It's really annoying to download 150Mb of JDK and Netbeans just to discover it's corrupt and then have to download it all again.

Better yet, just don't mess with my data. If there's a security issue tell me about it and let me choose what to do, otherwise get out of the way.

1 - I do all my web browsing, email etc on my Mac so internet security on my PC isn't a concern↩