Battling Bad Installers With Autoruns
I have an ongoing war with bad Windows installers. I just installed an Intel video driver that re-added its resident hotkey app to auto-start and it got me wanting to write about this.
(I touched on this a little in a previous post, but now I’m fired up about it! Rarr!)
Disclaimer: Many apps I use have very well-behaved installers. They don’t try to install spyware toolbars. They leave my startup alone. They don’t install DLL’s to system32 or add new system fonts. They sometimes even offer to install in a portable form so I can run off a flash drive. These are written by good, underappreciated people and this article does not apply to them. You know who you are.
The Problem
This article is about arrogant programmers and marketroids who think that their app is so important that it’s got to install itself in every part of the system. The Internet is filled with complaints about this. Sticking icons every little place, putting themselves in every possible context menu in Explorer, creating multiple Start Menu entries, adding scheduled tasks, running “agents” that make sure all of this sticks… More and more ways every day. And I’m not even talking about malware.
The installers for these apps never ask permission to add these things to your system, aside from the trivial “add to desktop/quick start” type checkboxes. They just ask for UAC permission to get admin access, which is required by the system anyway to copy into Program Files. So you have no choice. You must approve the UAC dialog to use the app at all (partially defeating the purpose of UAC).
Once they have full admin permission, they’re free to install services, DRM drivers, and tray apps, mess with your file associations, add icons and toolbars, and so on. All without your knowledge or approval.
To make matters worse, a lot of these things are poorly programmed as well. They always assume they’re the only thing running on the system, and not fighting with all the other apps for access to CPU, hard disk, and memory. They never take into account hibernate/resume or system bootup time. They often crash when an unexpected condition occurs (like the network going down) and don’t correctly handle corrupted files after such a crash. And because they were installed with admin access, a badly programmed service or driver can easily blue-screen your system (hello Toshiba!).
The Doghouse
The big companies tend to be the worst because they have the most resources, version upgrades, and itchy marketroids available to dedicate to invading your system. Apple, Google, Microsoft, ATI, nVidia, Intel, Corel, Sun, Real, Sony and friends – you all suck.
RealNetworks used to be the gold standard by which these things were measured. I’ll never forget the shock I got when I installed their media player only to find a tray app was spamming me with popup advertisements. After a period of stubbornly refusing to change while their reputation took a plunge, they learned and stopped doing this (as much).
Page 1 of 5 | Next page
