Last year I bought a $600 Dell laptop with Windows 7. It came with a slew of applications including a free one year subscription for anti-virus. Normally I just use Microsoft’s free Security Essentials AV, but my laptop came preloaded and it allowed me to procrastinate changing the anti-virus software for 12 months, so why not?
Well, I should have known my laziness would get the better of me…
So my laptop caught a virus after my one year subscription expired but before I got off my lazy duff to install MS’s Security Essentials. Now I am a pretty savvy computer guy, having worked in IT since ’95, troubleshooting PCs and Macintoshes for America Online when everyone still asked “do you have the Internet?”. But, as luck would have it, I caught a boot-sector virus, one that installs itself at each reboot regardless of what you do with the files while the operating system is up. Now I have been complaining for about 10 years that the PC manufactures and specifically Microsoft (which essentially has the PC world wrapped around it’s little finger) needed to reassess its core components and underlying infrastructure, wipe the slate, and start fresh from the ground up. I mean seriously, we are still suffering in the PC world from architectures that were invented 30+ years ago! Let me gripe about some of what should have fundamentally changed by now:
- Why does an installed O/S need access to the boot sector? Microsoft should disable the ability to write to the bootsector in their operating system if it booted from said device.
- In that vein, why do PC manufactures allow the O/S to touch the boot sector? The BIOS should abstract that part of the hard drive and only make it accessible to alternatively booted media.
- Everything should require certificates to run.
- What I mean to say is that every executable should be signed by a publisher. All publishers should have to register with the operating system manufacture, any executable that is modified (by a virus for example) would have an invalid hash and wouldn’t be allowed to run. Any publisher that was known to create faulty or malicious code would have their certificate revoked and all of their software would stop running on all computers that checked the certificate revocation list.
- PC BIOS manufactures should only allow the BIOS to be modified by code that was signed with a proper certificate.
- PC manufacturers should NEVER write ANY part of their BIOS to the harddrive or any other media accesible to the O/S.
Consider for a moment the implications… the almost immediate halt to viruses and malicious code. No longer would I have to suffer through boot sector viruses that I can’t clean because my PC manufacture writes the BIOS to the harddrive and the virus was smart enough to modify it such that I can only boot from my fixed disk, so I can’t remove the virus. You know, the one smart enough to not allow me to remove it from the operating that was stupid enough to allow it to run.
So, now that I have a $600 brick sitting in my living room, hours wasted troubleshooting a device that never should have allowed such blatantly obvious malicious conduct to happen to begin with, and a level of frustration so high that I had to force myself to stay in my seat for fear that I would throw the laptop in the pond outside my deck. Instead I channeled all of that anger into a less than planned financial decision, but a decision I had been considering for years nonetheless: time to buy a Mac. Specifically an iMac. Jump in a lake Dell. You won’t see another penny from me Mr. Gates (and now you can’t afford to sterilize another 100,000 people in a third-world-country through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation without my valuable financial support).
It has only been two days since I received my iMac, but I have managed to successfully transfer every song, picture, or document I ever cared about. I have fallen in love with the intuitive nature of the Mac, while struggling to work with the trackpad (its more about muscle memorization than actual frustration. I imagine this is what the 40-and-over crowd went through in the mid-90′s when trying to get used to a mouse). I understand the Mac is much more expensive, but I have to say (in the very short time I have had it) that the lack of frustration just might be worth the money. [Caveat* I am still in the honeymoon phase so take this with a grain of salt.]
At the end of the day, I am beginning to see why people can be almost militant about their Macs, and I certainly can get behind the idea that the PC architecture, along with the Windows operating system is so far behind where they should have been, peddling the same old hardware or the same old code with a new shiny start-button.



