JonesPC

When I first got high speed internet, the cable installer came over and installed everything for me. He installed the NIC card, Plugged in the cable modem, installed the cable modem’s software, then called the company to get everything set up. After he left, I sat at the computer for the first time and fired up internet explorer by clicking on the new Cox branded icon. One thing I didn’t like was all of the extra software that was installed with my new high speed modem. There was diagnostic tools, there was some antivirus software, there was an email application and a few other things. Excite.com was my homepage, and I now had an @home email address.

I had a few problems with this.

I already had antivirus software on my computer so I didn’t need the one that was installed. The diagnostic tools that started when I started windows, slowed my PC down something awful. The extra software that was installed was completely useless to me, but loaded every time I started my computer. I didn’t care much for Excite.com being my homepage, and the email application was basically browser based and I didn’t need another application running in the background fetching email all of the time.

The smart thing would be to just uninstall all of the extra programs, but I was under the impression that the software bundle that was installed was needed for my high speed connection.

It wasn’t until I had some problems months later that I found out that I didn’t need that software. Cox had an outage that was suppose to be a day, but it lasted for more than a week…Well thats how long it lasted for me. I finally called Cox to see what was up and they told me that the outage was over and had been for a while. So they troubleshot my problem over the phone. Eventually they had me uninstall all of the software and just let my browser automatically detect an internet connection… And it worked. Even though I didn’t need anything installed for my high speed connection, they installed tons of junk and made me think that I needed it.

Every since then, I have bought plenty of products that come with software that I don’t need, routers, digital cameras, new cable modems. From that one experience, I know that most of those item’s included software are not needed, and usually you can just plug it in and use software you already have.

I wonder how many people think that the software that comes with their digital camera is the only way to get pictures from the camera to the PC? A lot. I have had a lot of people ask me about using those proprietary software install disk to get things working that usually just work without it. some have even taken product back to the store because they cant get that software to work.