I hate them. Every single one of them.

I really do hate them. So much.

My laptop blew up a few weeks ago. Okay, it didn't blow up exactly but the hard drive died. So it cost a bunch to get the hard drive replaced and I've been battling with a fresh install of Vista ever since. It's all these poxy updates. It downloaded and installed about a thousand and four crappy updates, each one with the sole purpose of trying to break my system.

And they succeeded.

It took another fresh install and a careful series of updating bit by bit followed by a huge trip through the system restore to get it working. And I'm still having to look at that 'your system didn't shut down properly screen'. The system stutters with a ridiculous amount of processes running, most of which are totally pointless. It has eaten up far too much time. All I want is a laptop that works.

It's easy to blame Vista but I have an XP desktop machine that is a magnet for spyware, malware and every other kind of ware they're is. I don't know if someone is secretly downloading shit the second I turn my back but I have every protection programme on the planet running on that thing and I still end up spending hours cleaning that piece of crap every time it gets infected - which is several times a day.

It's a constant battle.

Even at work, with corporate strength virus protection and firewalls, it turned out someones USB key was infected with a trojan and they were happily passing it around the studio.

I just hate computers. They take up far too much time than they deserve. Are there any computers anywhere that actually work as they should? That don't crash? Don't get broken by system updates? Actually, you know, work?