Tech and longevity

Don’t worry I’m not going to do a yearly wrap up, but a few thoughts that have been brewing over the past few weeks have come together.

My late grandmother’s husband is in rough shape mentally with dementia and likely doesn’t have all that much longer on this earth. Helping my parents find online accounts, including banks, utilities and such, has been a nightmare.

The cult of youth at tech companies hasn’t led to higher level solutions to managing accounts for elderly, people with cognitive disabilities and the deceased. Kev Quirk has a reflection on this, but he’s as lost and frustrated as anyone else.

I’m lucky in that my sister, parents and I all get along and completely trust one another, which means we have some hard copies of key information and a shared note with all the necessary info for when the inevitable happens. But the taboo against thinking about death in Western culture makes this an exception.

Another aspect of tech and longevity is how frustrating the requirement to use tech for everything is. Many elderly people would prefer to be able to call someone or use paper mail.

And then there’s the devices themselves. Here’s a thread worth reading:

I volunteer helping seniors with their technology issues. One of my regulars came in with a Lenovo laptop. It still had a retail sticker; I imagine she bought it used, for over $500

“I bought this so recently, how is it already so slow,” she asked me

I fire up the task manager to get a look at things

She’s right: her CPU capacity is SATURATED at regular intervals. The laptop is barely usable.

Digging into the list of processes, there’s all kinds of Lenovo branded junkware running in the background.

A quick Google search confirms this is a common issue on these machines. I try to launch Lenovo’s frontend for all of this junk…

and it gets so much worse. All this hideous Lenovo branding in an unnecessary splash screen, leading to a hideous app of zero value

As I’m digging around I realize what’s going on: Lenovo wants surveillance turf

They want a “relationship” with the customer that’s a thinly veiled back door into their machine. How often does the trackpad REALLY need a firmware update?

I ask my client for consent to remove it

The challenge is that now with this garbage program running in the foreground, the whole machine has truly ground to a halt

It takes me five minutes (!) of the limited time in our appointment even to access the Add/Remove Programs panel, so slow is everything running

After explaining the situation to the client, I purge EVERYTHING related to this Lenovo branded surveillance garbage from the machine, just as we’re running out of time.

And instantly: it’s usable again. CPU graph cools down, UI becomes reliably responsive again.

There’s more, but that’s the main story. Non-techies, elderly and others are spending a fortune on devices that barely work because of bloated software. Buy hey, at least some PMs and other middle managers hit their KPIs!

Any talk of sustainability that doesn’t include device longevity isn’t serious. Phones and laptops need to last more than a couple of years.