So, I had the pleasure of being called upon to resurrect a friend’s PC from issues ranging from a missing graphics driver (how this got deleted, I have *no* idea), various Trojan flavors to dealing with an anemic hard disk drive (67MB of space left on a 30gb disk). I was eager to call upon my superior googling skills to solve the issue, but I faced just more than fixing a ‘sick’ computer. I was faced with the biggest problem of all: user apathy. You see, one of my biggest pet peeves is seeing a computer and its software go unpatched and/or un-updated. I kvetched to my hubby about how said friend should just move to a Mac if he couldn’t handle the responsibility of owning a PC and it got me thinking about how Microsoft could change the perception that PCs are a lot of headache. Seriously, the main reason from my limited view) about the plethora of virii available on the Windows platform is solely due to its popularity. By that theory, Macs will soon witness the same epidemic if people migrate to that platform in droves which they apparently are doing as Macs are gaining user share rather quickly. Anyway, I digress. Why I subscribe to the school of learning about my tools and being a proactive user, I can appreciate the fact that not everyone gets excited about learning how to protect their PCs and they would frankly rather NOT bother with running Microsoft Update if it didn’t know to update itself already. So, I guess the point of this little nugget of a post is: what can people who care about technology do to encourage technologically-challenged or plain disinterested people to ‘care’ about their PCs. To computer makers: what can YOU do to make the experience of caring about your PCs a better one for us, users?
Just a thought. š
