Apple the Saboteur

[mewickham]

A while back, my wife's laptop computer stopped recognizing its DVD drive. I reinstalled the DVD drivers. Nothing happened. The drive was still not found by the computer. It turned out that installing Apple iTunes was the culprit-- an issue with something called a GEAR driver, installed by Apple.

I recently built a new computer. After a while, a problem showed up that, whenever I rebooted, my Internet connection disappeared. I could still reach all the computers on the network, but I just couldn't get the network to connect to the Internet anymore. I had to reinstall the network card driver every time I rebooted. I found information on the Internet telling me to turn it off the Bonjour service, a networking service installed when I installed Apple QuickTime! Lo and behold, I had just recently installed QuickTime. I removed the Bonjour service and now things are fine again.

I wonder how many many millions of PC owners suddenly find that their DVD drives, network cards, or other hardware items stop functioning, and have no idea what to do. They end up paying large fees to have someone repair their computer, or worse, waste money by buying a new one-- maybe even an Apple because they've been told that they "just work." (They don't. Apple computers have problems of their own. Just Google "Apple corrupt fonts" as an example. This sure feels like Apple is sabotaging PCs.

If I were you, I'd be very careful installing any Apple software on your PC. At least, create a restore point before you do so (though I'm not even sure that will help).

[pinkrblu]

Thanks for posting this, Mike. A good friend of mine bought a new laptop about a month ago, and a few days ago the DVD drive stopped working. I'm waiting for her to return my call. Hope this fixes it for her!