Sadly some in the IT industry are all brand and no trousers. This page is where I name and shame them...

Some of these manufacturers, retailers and products were once good, some not so good. Some have spread themselves too thick, and some too thin. There follows a list of companies and products I cannot in all good conscience recommend. These opinions are based on first-hand experience (what I have seen whilst working with / fixing hundreds of different systems over the past few years) NOT scientific bench testing so your mileage may vary...

MICROSOFT VISTA - Overhyped, Overpriced and Over here.

It is telling that the price of Microsoft's previous (and they would have us believe inferior) operating system WINDOWS XP is on the rise again. It is also telling that despite Microsoft announcing that they would soon stop selling XP 12 months ago they have had to bow to industry pressure and continue providing it. Vista has been a resounding flop in the IT world for a simple reason: nobody particularly needs or wants it. A Vista computer can't do anything over and above an XP computer * AND, by and large, the XP machine will do it faster. Also, whilst failing to offer any new functionality worth lusting over, this 'upgrade' breaks compatibility with a lot of old software. Not only will you have to pay more for this version of Windows than any previous edition, you may also have to spend a small fortune upgrading your other software too, assuming whoever makes it supports Vista (by no means guaranteed!)

Sadly, if you are looking for a new PC these days you will find it hard to avoid Vista and you may have to pay more to get XP. This is because Microsoft, realising no-one is buying the staggeringly expensive boxed versions of Vista, is making damn sure all the OEMs put it on all their new machines, even if it means heavily discounting it against XP to persuade them.

A word of warning: NOW IS NOT A GOOD TIME TO BE BUYING A BUDGET PC! If you are looking at the budget end of the market you might be tempted by some of the cheap desktops and laptop offers from Dell & PC World etc. A sub £400 laptop will run XP fine, however it almost certainly WILL COME WITH VISTA and it almost certainly WON'T RUN VISTA NICELY. Likewise the cheapo £200 base unit from Aldi will handle XP passably but struggle with Vista. If you can't find a cheap machine with XP and you can't afford to pay upwards of £350 for a desktop or £500 for a laptop then don't bother getting a Vista machine... Either save up, go for a second hand XP machine or build your own (I can help you with the last two options).

(* DirectX 10 is only being released for Vista - unless you are at the bleeding edge of high end gaming this is of no consequence.)

NORTON and MCAFFEE ANTIVIRUS - Past their sell by dates

Imagine your computer as a nicely fitting pair of slacks. Now imagine Norton antivirus as a great big cake, say a wedding cake, and McAffee as an enormous plate of cream buns... Yum, they certainly look delicious don't they?

There was a time when these were both excellent products but for several years now both companies have been resting on their laurels. Over the years the efficient and lean antivirus products they used to make have metamorphosed into 'value added' bloatware suites leading us to a grand irony which would be quite funny, had you not just spent £35 on a Norton subscription! Namely: these products, which built their reputation killing off annoying virii that were causing massive system instability and slowdowns are now the chief cause of system instability and slowdowns on most peoples computers!

The solution of course is a crisp invogorating salad (Kaspersky AV - commercial), or a light but satisfying minestrone soup (Grisoft AVG - free). I really oughtn't tell you this, as my reputation as a miracle worker is partly due to it, but in many cases you can reduce a systems 'full boot time' * by over 60% by ditching these tubby suites in favour of the lean software listed above.

* full boot time: Microsoft want you to think their products are fast so when starting up, rather than wait til everything is loaded, a Microsoft Windows systems will give you the desktop and mouse pointer as soon as it can and then continue loading all the other crap in the background. Of course while your computer is still doing this it's going to be extremely sluggish and unresponsive i.e. not actually ready yet. The 'full boot time' is the time it takes the sytem to start up, load all the background programs and widgets then settle down and stop making those grinding noises. On systems running Norton and McAffee I have often seen this take over 5 minutes, sometimes significantly longer. By simply replacing these apps you can often get it down to nearer 2 minutes, sometimes less.

PCWORLD - Okay so if there's an emergency at least it's there...

But OMG is it ever expensive, and in a sneaky way too! Their desktops and laptops are actually quite competetively priced for a retail outlet but that ain't where the cream's at, oh no. For example: "Here, have a free Lexmark printer" - of course once you've bought a set of cartridges off us you could have afforded a printer that's actually cheap to run instead but nevermind! "You want an 10 meter Ethernet cable with that? Here you go, that'll be £34.99" - lucky for us no-one told you about svp.co.uk where they sell the same thing for £2.78!)

SONY - MP3 Players, Camcorders and especially Laptops

Beautiful they are - but functional they are not, well not when compared to other manufacturers anyway. The digital audio players (and for that fact their MD players!) are crippled with DRM and allow limited or no interoperability with software other than their own (ugly) player/uploader. Being the worlds largest record and games company Sony are particularly militant when it comes to copy-protection technology, sometimes to the exclusion of basic functionality. A year or two back they were caught stealthily using hacking technology to install their nasty (and insecure) DRM software on people's PCs behind their backs whenever they played Sony-BMG audio CDs in their computer. Whatever you think of the ethics of digital rights management simply put, this rabid anti piracy agenda means Sony products often do less than their competitor's equivalents.

Over the years I have had cause to use several Sony DV camcorders. You would have thought that a company like Sony who also make a huge range of professional broadcast equipment would do a good job of this. To be fair, they are quite robust, well featured machines that are fairly nice to use, that is until you need to use tapes made by another manufacturer, or recorded on some other brand of camcorder. Here I have repeatedly run into problems that I haven't with other big players like Canon and Panasonic. I therefore believe it's fair to say Sony's cross compatibility in this field is singularly poor.

Sony Vaio laptops look great but have a poor track record. A whole series of machines they put out a few years back had such severe design problems a large number of them failed (almost irrepairably) from heat damage within a few years, I have had first hand experience of this more than once and it seems from the recent issues with the PS3 and the incendiary laptop battery recall that they haven't learned their lesson. Also, although circumstantial, I don't recall having seen a working Vaio more than a couple of years old once in the last couple of years, and I have dealt with literally hundreds of laptops in that time. The Vaio's I have seen recently have been less than 12 months old and already running (Vista) like dogs. Last year one of my clients spent A LOT of money one one of Sony's first Vista machines (sadly shortly before she met me). It had a fantastic spec (Core Duo 2.4 / 2 Gb RAM) but was running extremely slowly and suffering from several ugly bugs that prevented it shutting down. After battling with it for a whole evening I decided to cut my losses and do a factory restore and EVEN AFTER the factory restore IT WAS STILL SLOW!!! It still took over 3 minutes to fully boot and an age to shut down and the graphics were embarrasingly sluggish (and yes I did have the latest Sony drivers!). Now I have seen, and to some extent would expect this from Vista on a real budget machine, say one under £400, but this one cost over TWICE that and was still rubbish out of the box! Since then I have seen two other recent Sony laptops that cost evn more performing just as dismally!

It is my opinion that (apart from some excellent, expensive and exotic models you can generally only get in Japan) Sony Vaio laptops are bad value for money. Even the mighty Toshiba have gone off the boil in recent years IMHO. If you're in the market for a new laptop try Lenovo, or Acer if you're on a budget. Avoid Vista IF you can, and if you can't then don't spend under £500 as it would be depressing to spend hundreds of pounds only to be left with a user experience akin to running through treacle.

ADOBE READER - You were so cute when you were little!

Adobe Acrobat Reader 2 would fit on a single floppy disk. Acrobat Reader 4 was only about 5Mb. Go to Control Panel \ Add Remove Programs right now and see how big YOUR current copy of Acrobat Reader 8 is... In fact - don't, I'll spare you the trouble, it's nearly 100 bloody megabytes! It takes an age to open fully (a clear minute on some systems I have encountered!). This is DESPITE the 'speed launcher' they built in to make it appear as if it was loading quickly when actually it was just loading at startup and hiding itself til you opened a PDF, hogging your memory and slowing down your whole boot process. Sadly the only concesion to brevity in the latest version is dropping the 'Acrobat' to make it simply 'Adobe Reader'. Well done them!

So why is Adobe Reader so large now? Frankly who the hell cares when there's free alternative that takes all of 2 minutes to download and install and loads PDF files from a cold start in a couple of seconds. It's called Foxit and you can find a download link here on my recommended software page.

BELKIN 802.11G WIFI PRODUCTS - A company this large and diverse is bound to make the odd donkey!

They make so much stuff (some of it quite innovative) I can't really hold it against them. Notwithstanding this neither can I recommend their wireless products. Of all the failed / wonky routers and WiFi adapters I have encountered in the last few years the overwhelming majority (read 3 out of 4) have been Belkin. This is particularly unlucky as one of my clients told me they bough theirs on the strength of Which Magazine's recommendation. Indeed Belkin routers are quite easy to install and have good range. Sadly their default security is 'none' and what my clients (particularly those who work from home) value above all else is reliability. Their new 'N' range may be more reliable but they haven't been out long enough for me to say. Similarly (also from a first hand perspective) D-Link seemed to be having a rough patch reliability-wise a few years ago. They may well have resolved this now but I haven't seen much D-Link equipment around recently so I'd still be tempted to shy away from them. Bearing in mind that no domestic Wifi stuff is bulletproof (I've encountered problems with all brands of router) I have nontheless noticed Linksys' products seem quite stable, as do Netgear's more recent products.

ALL Bundled Printer Software (but particularly HP!)

Q: Why does a printer take half an hour to install these days?
A: It doesn't.
The printer itself takes about a minute to install; what takes 29 minutes is the several hundred megabytes of crappy photo / library / manager / editor / online publisher software that comes bundled along with it on the CD. For a start - Windows can already get the photos off your digital camera and display them without this kind of software; that's built in these days! Secondly - if you do yearn for an all in one photo library / manager / editor / online publisher thingy then download Google's Picassa - it's small, fast, beautiful and fully functioned. What nobody needs is the kind of software you get bundled with HP printers these days i.e. something LIKE picassa (minus the speed and the beautiful interface) weighing in at a lewd and unjustifiably portly 350 Megabytes! I don't care if it can print Christmas cards! I really don't, and neither do you if you think about it! Always bear in mind, in the world of computers, even the worst ideas have been realised so many times you have A BEWILDERING CHOICE of specialized software for pretty much any occasion at you fingertips, just google "free card maker" and install something WHEN YOU NEED IT AND NOT BEFORE. That way your computer might make it to Christmas without needing an upgrade!

HP in particular deserve singling out for their love of bundling unbelievably huge swaggering towering swathes of low quality software with both their printers and laptops, something that is not just annoying but also dangerous, as more code = more bugs = larger attack surface = more security problems. Sadly they are by no means the only ones that do this, just the worst. The best thing to do when you get a new printer is go to the manufacturers website and see if you can download just the plain 'print driver' and just install that. HP term this the 'corporate driver' presumably because no company in posession of their faculties would buy a printer if it was going to take half a day to install and then make their computers slower and less stable.