You mispelled symbiotic.

It's a typo, but yeah ... it's still ironic that it's linked to a dictionary.com entry.

It's also ironic that you misspelled "misspelled" ... but now we're getting off topic. ;)

It's amazing the way people deal with computers though. It's way different then the way people deal with cars. You don't see people going out and buying cars without knowing how to drive them. People who have absolutely no idea how to use a computer go out and buy them everyday. They also never get them fixed, until they are completely broken. People will take their car to the shop the minute they hear a weird noise, or smell something weird. A computer can be running at a quarter of the speed it should be, and crashing every 30 minutes, and people still won't take it into get it fixed. It's a good thing that people don't treat their cars the way they do their computers, or there'd be a lot of people stranded on the highway.

I guess that's the difference though: a computer crash won't kill ya.

yuk yuk

I am mechanically quite stupid. I pay to get my bike tuned - because that is not what I really care to know about. I don't really care to know how to care for my bike... it doesn't really interest me.

But you still go and get it tuned. I don't know of anybody who takes their computer in for a tune up. Some computer geeks tune their computers themselves, but that's kind of different. I wonder if there's money to be made in computer tune-ups? Cleaning out the dust, getting rid of all the junk programs that people have never used past the day they installed them. Ensuring all the connections are good and that everything is in good working order. Computers would last much longer if they were taken better care of.

It's definitely interesting that people don't do that Kibbee, especially since arguably computer hardware/software is more complicated than an automobile or a bike.

It can be expensive to just get your computer cleaned up. Now that computer prices are low, it's almost worth waiting until you had to upgrade so you can just buy a new machine. :)

It's just like hen people were having problems with Windows 98 getting slow after a few years (months in my case), they'd ask me "what can we do? delete a bunch of files? defrag?" and I said that it was much easier just to format the hard disk and start over.

That's starting to be the case now with some spyware and viruses too. The detection programs are good, but they don't catch eveything. Some people just end up nuking everything.

I think one of the reasons that it is easier to just format and reinstall everything is that people wait so long to fix anything. They usually wait till their computer is completely useless. By that time the best thing to do, is to format. If the computer is cleaned often enough, the spyware/stuff that's not needed can be cleaned much easier.

I think that if you could get a brand new car for 1-2k $, people would not actually get it tuned up at all. If things are working badly on your car and you could just "reinstall" everything to get it back to 100%, why would you bother to maintain it? I don't think people would, just because people are lazy.

Just think about all the people who lease new cars all the time at that large cost? Why do they do it? To have a new car and not to have to maintain it.

Really, I think that you guys are comparing apples and oranges.

It's true that car and computer repair require different considerations, but it's interesting to discuss why.

While some software might be cheap to just reinstall like Windows 98, other large-scale enterprise software is not. It might be much cheaper to bring in someone to come in and "clean things up" than it would be to buy a new product.

Understanding that break-even point is useful for for software engineers because the solution isn't always to make something new or reinstall. Often the customer just wants the cheapest thing that solves the problem to their satisfaction.

Maybe the reason that Windows is so easy to install is because people wouldn't use it if it wasn't. If my Linux system needed to be formatted and reinstalled as much as windows, then I would not be using Linux.