by Bryon D Beilman
PC hardware and software manufacturers are taking their users hostage. What seems like a nice introduction or free offering to the casual observer is really a targeted approach to a captive user in order to extract more money out of the consumer. I will offer a few examples.
Microsoft has a built in disk de-fragmention tool in their operating system. It is well known that you should defragment your dis periodically to keep performance levels to a reasonable level. There are better commercial defragmentation tools that can be scheduled and keep track of how the fragmentation affects performance. One such tool is diskkeeper. Lenovo laptops now come with a "Lite" version of diskkeeper that will defragment your disk to about the same level at the native Microsoft tool does. If you want to upgrade the provided version, you can build an automated schedule and maintain X% threshold of fragment free files. Sounds reasonable, except that it continually prompts you for this as you try to use it. I have a problem with this guerrilla technique. For the uneducated user, the wording convinces them that they really need it, and it came with the PC, so they should "buy it" and after a few clicks and a credit card later, they now have this power. The Thinkpad series is one of the better choices for corporate users, yet they put this software on these units. The IT person has to either buy a site license for this so that it can be used on all computers, deinstall it on each one, or let it out there in the wild, so that their users can spend their money on their "work laptop" or send requests to IT to either "Buy the program" or just waste time by asking "what should I do?"
Diskkeeper and Lenovo are only examples of many instances of this practice. The biggest user of this technique is the Antivirus companies, by giving users 30-60 days of antivirus updates, then asking them for money to upgrade. They have a captive audience and the software is useful if not required in todays world. Giving people a choice is not the same as holding users hostage. I'm not sure what can be done about this, but I believe it is going to get worse rather than better. Search engines by Microsoft and others can scan your hard disk to look at your files and then target ads to you based on what is on your hard disk. Is this smart or intrusive?
Either way, I recommend deinstalling all of the "hostageware" when you get your new PC and install only what you want and need.