Choice - the Microsoft way

[cfitz]

I wanted to run a test on a pressed CD this evening and made the mistake of putting a Microsoft CD into one of my drives, forgetting that I had autorun enabled. It installed, without any warning or prompting, some sort of Windows Media Player update, then presented me with this dialog box:



So, where is the "No" button? What kind of choice is that? And why did they even bother asking?

No choice about the mystery installation, and no choice about rebooting... It's a good summary of Microsoft's dream in general: no choice at all.

That will teach me to leave autorun enabled...

cfitz

[TheWizard]

As I mentioned in the current overburning thread in the CD-R/RW Forum, I like DOS.

[Dartman]

Well lets hope it wasn't 9. From what I hear it introduces all kinds of copy protection even to things that you made on your own so you can't play them anywhere but the machine they were made on.
I haven't taken the plunge just in case it's correct here. 8 and 2 work fine and so does IRfanview and the others for me.

[cfitz]

No, it wasn't 9. I'm still running 7. And frankly it happened so quickly that it couldn't have installed much beyond a configuration setting. It certainly didn't have time to load, install and configure a typical multi-tens of megabytes Microsoft installation package. I haven't noticed any changes, and I am keeping my fingers crossed...

cfitz

[Dartman]

Well your probably fine then. If your running XP you could always do a system rrestore and get it back to the before hand state, it's worked for me a few times
8 seems to be just fine if you ever want to step up.

[cfitz]

8 seems to be just fine if you ever want to step up.

Thanks. I'll keep that in mind. At some point I will have to, just to be able to get security patches.

cfitz

[Dartman]

You know that you don't have to take every patch they want to give you, right? I pick and choose and I've disabled auto update so I can do it when I'm ready instead of those constant updates are ready to install BS.
I tried 9 long enough to see it worked, uninstalled it before I really played with it and ended up reinstalling XP anyways as I was setting up my new 80 gig drive. I still have my earlier install on the slave drive, if something goes away I can boot to it and be mostly home again

[BuddhaTB]

I've been using 9 for about a month now. Only differences I notice is the way the player looks and that copyright protection junk. Does anyone have a link to 8, because all Microsoft has on their website is 7 & 8.

[Dartman]

I think all the links go to 9 now, I haven't looked for a while.
If you have the XP setup disk you might be able to get it from there. Other wise the usual hacker type places and usenet groups would be a good place to look. I use like yahoo to search for what I need and it's pretty good, also I have Kazaa lite v2 and I'm sure it's on there somewhere www.k-lite.tk is the direct site if you don't have it. It removes all the spyware and adds some extra functions.

[cfitz]

You know that you don't have to take every patch they want to give you, right?

Sure. I don't get any of my patches via automatic updates. I subscribe to Microsoft's security alerts list, and decide for myself what patches to install and when to install them.

cfitz

[Dartman]

Well I figured ya did with all the things you gotta jump through but it never hurts to check

[KuoH]

It's just part of Microsoft's world domination plot. It was designed to give you the illusion of having control over your own destiny.

KuoH

[img]No choice about the mystery installation, and no choice about rebooting... It's a good summary of Microsoft's dream in general: no choice at all.

[Turkeyscore.com]

Hey be nice to microsoft...it is a lot better than macintosh