Buy a new workstation – even a “commercial grade” desktop or laptop – it’s full of “crapware”, or a bunch of trial software that will drive you nuts.

Maybe you’ve seen this: It looks like your new PC “comes with” Norton Anti-virus (as an example). Well, it came with it, all right, but just for 90 days. That’s when the unending “nagware” popups start. And with our friends at Symantec (the Norton people), even just buying their silly software from their silly nagware can be a challenge.

It’s a lame practice and there finally is some noise being made about it. CNet.com has a good story about it, how so often when you buy a new PC you spend the first hours with it just uninstalling all that nonsense. We know what that’s like, and we suspect you do, too. The worst offenders are the home-flavor PCs like you would buy at a big box store, for example, but even the commercial-grade stuff has enough of it. And just doing a “clean re-install” doesn’t exactly fix things, as the CNet article details.

See the CNet.com article here

BlackBerry announces a new piece of software that will allow for non-BlackBerry smartphones (running Windows Mobile) to get full BlackBerry services.

This is pretty big, and allows BB to be used with any number of smartphones, such as those sold by HP, Motorola, Nokia, and Palm. Pretty neat.

Information Week has the story here

Well, this has happened to all of us at one time or another, right? Install a software upgrade — so the software runs “better” — and it breaks the software that was running OK in the first place.

That seems to be what happened with this week’s BlackBerry outage.

eWeek has the story here.

Here is a piece from eWeek.com about the BlackBerry mess. Looks to be A-OK now. If you use BlackBerry for all your mail, you maybe, could have, lost some mail. If you get your Blackberry through an Exchange server you should be OK.

See the story here

CNet.com says:

BlackBerry is up, but problems remain

Read it here

and the “Western Hemisphere” is, of course, us!

Your BlackBerry phone works just fine, but no email for now.

News on the situation:

Here

and

Here

That Strom Worm virus continues to be a major hassle, and the AV software folks are still stumped.

See the PC World story here

CNet has the latest –

“…Thursday likely marked the largest proliferation of e-mail virus attacks in more than a year.”

Read it here

This is an interesting take, from www.securityfocus.com:

Unknown attackers released a deluge of new Storm Worm variants over the weekend, using fake headlines warning of U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran to pique the curiosity of potential victims.

See the full article here