no, no... no! enough popping up in my face stupid messenger...

Yah, rant about windows live messenger, plus a bit about stuff these days.

To be honest it was bad enough when it told me to upgrade from version 8 to I don't know what over 14. I spent half a day familiarising myself with features that I really don't want, let alone need. Not to mention the fact that I had to download more junk to re-install after I got my schools exit image (there's more to rant about that, but I'll just tie in my major problem with that later) to what purpose is a download installer for a piece of FREE software?
WHAT PURPOSE?!
And now that I have a recent (as of a few weeks ago) version, I keep getting stupid pop-ups about, yepp you guessed it, more crappy features that I don't want/don't need/can't use. And I can't stop them.

Which brings me to the main beef I have with todays stuff, there's too much useless junk in the things we buy. Programs, utilities, functions, don't get me wrong they are nice but there needs to be some sort of moderation.
Take windows 7 for example, a lot of the functions there were already in windows, they just weren't implemented in the eye-candy style or as easy as drag and drop. seriously, I had toolbars on my windows 98 machine oh so many years ago, providing me shortcuts to all my games n stuff. and as far as the eye candy goes, it's mind-poppingly good... but it's eye candy, pointless for the power-user or the tweaker after maximum performance. Not to mention the prohibitive costs. I must admit I'm poor, but heck, even if I had the money, I don't think I'd fork out that much for a new OS, no matter how shiny it is...
But then back to my current OS (Windows XP) and it's setup on my computer (schools exit image, aka the image of the retail of my computer) I had an absolute pain of a time trying to patch it up... and I still have 500 odd meg to a gig of downloads for updates. Post installing of SP3 (yet more downloads to make) and software drivers for stuff I never really needed. It was a complete mess, not to mention I had to go look around for a wireless client that actually worked.

to try and explain what I've been getting at all rant is a lot of the programs I see these days are bloated, and often have unwanted stuff popping up whenever it feels like annoying me. and too many hoops and holes to jump just to get rid of it, if it's at all possible to remove. Why can't there be something out there that's simple, effective, efficient and secure, but still well known and easily supported?

Well... I'll leave the rest to whoever, I honestly don't have the time or money to go building an OS.
Thanks for reading (if you managed to read it all)
- Rob