Where’s the peanut butter?!

There is this old Peanuts cartoon that a lot of people recognize where Lucy is sitting behind some scrapwood with a sign on her desk reading “psychiactric advice 5¢” I am constantly reminded about this when I see articles or blog entries like this one which is currently the most popular delicious link. And it drives me crazy because the author carelessly denounces numerous services and just tells readers to disable them. I couldn’t make it very far but it starts by telling you to disable the service that does LAN network resolution saying that no home users need this service. The discussion should not start and end with whether or not the service is essential, it should include the impact of the service and a justification for its removal. The author carelessly ignores “did 99% of the testing in windows probably happen with this service enabled and is there any practical benefit to disabling it?” Later the author advises that readers disable crash reporting and completely misrepresents the service as “sending information to microsoft? no thanks.” We could debate whether a sound is made when a tree falls in the forest but I can assure you that if you don’t send your (anonymized) crash reports to Microsoft, no one will know, care, or fix the bug. Then he says you should disable the content indexing service saying you should just use google desktop instead. I will concede that the user experience with Google Desktop is a lot smoother, but this is especially frustrating. If you hate microsoft so much that you’re going to write an article that defenselessly says “you should disable this core service that has been shipping for years and does basically exactly what Google Desktop does and then go install Google Desktop” then why don’t you just quit using Microsoft software entirely? Obviously your philosophy is “microsoft=bad, everything else=good.” “We love Google - it’s so easy to use and they’re so not evil.” Oh yeah? My wife went to lunch at Google yesterday and had to electronically sign-in to enter the building and sign an NDA. To get lunch.

The real problem is this: if someone isn’t in a position to research and understand whether some system service is beneficial to his computer experience, he probably shouldn’t be told to just go in and disable a ton of services. Definitely not with advice that starts “First, disable the mechanism that helps identify and report problems to people who will understand your problem.” Ugh.