After missing “The great climate change swindle” on channel 4 yesterday I decided I was going to watch it on 4OD, hoping that it might help me with an essay that I have to write for tomorrow as part of an energy studies course.

I visited the channel four website and find that they do not support anything other than windows. Helpful, when my desktop doesn’t ‘do’ windows.

I fire up my laptop, connect it to the internet and begin downloading the executable from the 4OD website. Partway through the download my hard drive decides that it is full, so I delete a load of files that I don’t need. I really must get myself a bigger drive.

After successfully downloading the 4OD executable, I run it. It decides I need the .net framework, and proceeds to download that (not a small download at nearly 200MB). After taking an age to install the .net framework which I never asked for, I get told that I need to update windows. Something to do with needing the latest media player to play the 4OD stuff. In order to download the latest media player, I needed to install Windows Genuine Advantage (don’t get me started about this, I hate the way micro$oft assume everyone guilty until proven innocent, and can get away with putting spyware on machines under the guise of ‘genunine advantage’).
With all this software installed, my computer decided It needed a reboot, because clearly updating a media player is such an integral part of the system that it needs to reboot. (Another one of the many reasons why I don’t like windoze: “A flea on the other side of the world has just farted, please reboot”)

After the reboot, I was informed that I needed to download some more spyware – DRM software. The dilogue box gave me no explaination of what DRM was, but I decided to let it anyway as I guessed 4OD would not work without such big brother tactics.

Eventually after another reboot, the 4OD service was working, and I could click on the icon and get a full screen of a channel 4 website, with the option to download films. I searched for “The great climate change swindle” and was greeted with a ‘rent for 99p’. After spending 4 hours trying to install the silly software, I think I deserved it free. However, by the time I had installed 4OD I had already managed to find the same film on youtube, and watched it.

So was the effort worth it? No. I now have a computer that is installed with lots of spyware, and software that does not want to remove itself. When I install a bigger hard drive in my laptop (hopefully very soon) 4OD is not on my to-install list – in fact, I will steer well clear of it. Bill Gates will be lucky if I even bother to put windoze on it, even when I have a legal licence!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 11:57 pm and is filed under Computer, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.