29 Reasons to Not Get Vista

Microsoft Windows Vista hits (assaults) consumers on 30 January 2007. Starting with New Years Day that gives you twenty nine days to think about the big mistake you're about to make.

Every day of January 2007 until Microsoft Windows Vista is released you can read yet another good reason why it's not a good idea to get it.

21 January 2007 Reason #21: It's called 'spyware'.

It started - so everyone thought - as a means for independent entrepreneurs to better finance their software projects online. Why not make two versions of the same product, one free and one licensed? But who helps finance the free product?

Easy: the ad companies. You see they can put 'banner ads' in your application and they pay you for it. If your user wants a version without the banner ads then all that's needed is a registration fee and the ads disappear. Seems a yummy deal.

Except it wasn't. For in addition to selling advertising space these companies 'tracked' where people went online: when you installed a program with advertising it surreptitiously tracked everything you did - and sent all that juicy information back to the 'mother ship' where it was collated and sold to the highest bidder.

You were being spied upon.

And that's only the start. Soon these ad companies - and other companies even less reputable - started figuring out ways to 'hijack' your computer - to force you to visit websites you'd have no intention of visiting.

And the methods used were myriad. Some of them changed your default browsing page; others saw that searches always ended up at their sites; still others spit out 'popup windows' all over the place - and with the 'client side technology' available could literally overwhelm you and make your computer unusable.

And of course we have the 'porn dialers': by your simply visiting the wrong page and without you actually opting into anything at all, they could download a program to your computer that disconnected you from your ordinary Internet connection and then dialed into a VERY expensive connection in a far away country where they got commissions by the minute. And you never saw or suspected a thing - until you got your next phone bill that is.

It's not that the Internet is dangerous, even if there are suspicious types lurking about: it's that Windows is dangerous. These terrible things never happen to people who are intelligent enough to not use Windows. Never.