Real Player sure is annoying.

Real Player is a really annoying program.

For a long time, years, I went without Real Player at all, just doing without any Real format files that couldn't be played with something else.

Then I found Realplayer Alternative (or whatever the exact is, maybe Real Alternative?) and that was useful; it played files and didn't bug you.

Two days ago I had some reason to install the true current version of RealPlayer.

Today I am uninstalling it.

It puts up a message window when the computer boots. I installed it to play files. I don't want it to be my friend and send me messages. I don't ever want the Real Player people to interact with me in any way except to play a file when I click on it. I don't want it to check for updates. I don't even want it to have a shortcut. It should be like a windows system file; when things go right you never know it exists.

So today it's goodbye to Real Player. Good riddance.

Ahh. the distinct pleasures of an mp3 player that thinks it owns your machine. Nice to know they are back to their old, stupid tricks; be glad it probably doesn't have a rootkit in it.

Interestingly enough, one of the originial Lindens came from that oft reviled software firm before working on SL. (hint: his C.V. is posted - or was - on the LL web page and his first initial is "P"

Coincidence???

While I was asleep two nights ago, my better computer installed Windows Desktop Search, which I did not want ask it to do, and which I have already tried out on my older computer and removed. During the uninstall process the user is warned of possible problems with a bunch of programs installed after WDS was installed, like 20 or so programs, which were not in fact installed after WDS, since WDS installed itself without me having installed itself.

Oh, I did ask to have some Microsoft software installed; I decided to try the new Windows Mail client, which would let me use the email that came with the Office Live Basic. Thing is, I had already finished installing and using the Mail program. There was a security shield icon showing, probably a fix for the IE security flaw that allowed the misuse of secondlife: urls. Whatever that windows "i'm going to bug you till you update" security icon was about, my computer modified it's operating system in ways I don't know about while I was asleep. My older computer, which doesn't have IE7 on it, did not reboot.

I use windows classic on my computers. For searching for files, I put the Start Search option in the old fashion mode; I think it looks sort of like a mutilated Windows 98 file search.

When I want to look for a file on my computer, I want to look for a file on my computer, not a video on the internet. I don't want to see the words Video or Sound or anything like that unless they are in the names of folders that I named. I don't want to have a folder named My Pictures unless I named the folder My Pictures. I don't want the system to always be trying to show me thumbnails when I open a folder because it thinks that it is a folder of pictures; some of my folder have many hundreds, maybe thousands, of 1024 x 768 images, some of which are uncompressed bmp or tif files, and waiting for the thumbnails to appear is slow as molasses. One common situation is: I want to locate picture of SuezanneC to use as an icon for some forum or social networking space. When you open the BIG FOLDER of pictures, the dialog boxes often start trying to display thumbnails. Hmm, there's another problem with this process, which is that the display wants to start out with subfolders. I don't want to see icons of folders. I don't want to see the folders listed at the top about 98 percent of the time I look in a folder. Almost all the time I'd rather have the files only show by default, with maybe a button to toggle subfolder display off and on. Even if I do want to see folders, I dont' want to see twenty identical icons of folders. Just give me a file finding dialog with a place to select which machine at top, defaulting to the machine the dialog is running on, then a place for drive letters, maybe followed by, optionally, a customizable device description, like "hard drive" or "dvd burner". The icons don't do me much good, if they are big enough to see they are too big, if they are small enough (no higher than the text) then they are too small to see, therefore, the icons should not exist. Now, back to the part about wanting only "Sue*" pictures: in the dim dawn of prehistory, lots of file finding dialogs didn't actually do anything after they appeared, until you pressed return, and there was a field you could type a search string in, so that you could select to show thumbnails (assuming you could even see thumbnails, back then, thumbnails were kinda hi-tech, and only list files that start with "Sue", and there wouldn't be a bunch of folders showing at the top of file list, just files. And we liked it.

Hmm, I seem to have lost the track of what I was griping about. However, that won't stop this train of grousing; I'll just move on to something else.

There's this file "sqlservr.exe" that starts running on my older system from time to time that bogs down my surfing. Now, it could be that I shouldn't try having so many programs running at once on my old machine, expecially with 34 browser tabs open in Opera, but I used to be able to do this without this particular problem occuring. I think this may be a result of trying to use Windows Live Messenger. I read that sqlserver.exe is part of WLM and its trying to defrag some part of the hard drive. Well, I don't want it to. The operating system and computer can just work a little harder when needed to get a file, I do not want my computer to bog down from unwanted defragging just because I installed Windows Live Messenger solely to use the [email]hipihi@msn.com[/email] IM group.

I'll tell you what this think about, it's making me think about Macs and Linux. I'm a bit old and set in my ways, and I've gotten lazy, so the thought of switching operating systems doesn't fill me with the anticipation of the joy of discovery, it more fills me with the dread of having to learn a whole new way of doing things with the end result being that I'll be running the Mac with as many of the fancy interface features disabled as I can, i.e., I'll be trying to make the Mac look like Wind 98, or stuck having to use a command line on linux, and when I ask for help, I'll get answers that say "it's easy, just type <<command string followed by 124 character long pathname>> followed by twenty parameters each of which includes something like a choice of either a semi-colon or a colon, which are nearly indistinguishable to me unless I sit up straight and get my eyes at the exact distance from the monitor for proper focus, and maybe get a paper towel and some windex and clean the glass to boot.

Be that as at may, one sees a bunch of stuff about the Macs that can also do XP, but given how annoying Windows and programs that run on Windows can be, there might be a market for a Mac that can also do Linux, with Linux already installed and able to run parallel to the Mac OS like XP does.

That would give you one box with two alternate OS's and no trace of Microsoft. One box is nice, my computers take up too much space as it is. One box to be the third one, the different one, would be a lot nicer than two boxes.

Ok, enough of that stuff.

I am aware that Philip Rosedale was part of the Real team a while back, and I don't know that there's any connection or significance to that fact and the fact that Real Player is incredibly aggravating and overly communicative for a mere computer to be. Second Life doesn't aggravate in the same way at all. Winamp, despite having lost its soul to AOL , is still not as annoying as Real Player, and even the Windows Media player doesn't seem to bother me much; I don't use it much and it doesn't constantly badger me to update it.

I might have left Real Player around for a while, but when I went to select the option to turn off the Messages function, it advised me that it I needed to install it the rest of the way in order to use the disable messages feature. So they installed the part that can badger you with messages and inundate you with ads and update reminders (or even worse, automatic updates) but not the part that lets you disable badgering. Bad move. Bad sales technique. Bad Real Player. Bad bad bad.

I used Real Player and Real Jukebox long before WinAmp was ever popular or even existed (I think). I rip all my CD's with Real Jukebox. Then, I aquire an ARQ-1 music server. It has no problems playing MP3's made with Real Jukebox. Then, even, later, I find out about SL, so I set up my land to stream music from ARQ-1. But, I find out that all my MP3's that were created with Real Jukebox will not play inside SL!!! So, I remove Real Jukebox and re-rip my CD's with WinAmp. Real *.* was good in their days, but not no longer. Best thing to do is totally remove Real products, there are now better alternatives.

I do remember on my DX2-33 - or DX2-66, an 80486 machine, it's been so long I don't recall exactly what it was called, my old Packard Bell that I bought myself I guess twelve years ago, I think it was, back when I had dial up, Real Player was hot stuff.

Please folks, when you provide media files, always try to give people a choice of a non-Real format.

Cannot stand RealPlayer; invasive, slow, bloated....and did I say invasive? I avoid webpages that use it.