Posted on Dec 26, 2007

So you wake up one morning and you find yourself in a dark room with little light. Comfort sets in as you see your most precious belongings across the room organized by type of contents. You don't know how you got to this dark room, but your favourite books and family album are all on hand. As your about to reach to them, you bang up against a glass wall. After much searching, you notice that there is a small opening at the bottom of the glass window that gives you a preview of your stuff. You can't write anything in your journal, but you can flip the pages. This is a small consolation, as whoever put you there seems to have already accessed all your stuff for you. You hear some noises. You realize that you are alone in this dark room, but that others, a lot of people can see you through some other glass wall, like they use in interrogation rooms. No one speaks to you or anything. It feels like your a caged animal in a zoo with a blind on top your cage, that only blocks you from seeing what's outside, but allows anyone outside from seeing you. No food or water has been given to you. You assume, after a little while that your only escape is starvation and then hopefully, you will just die and be off to a better place. But problem is, maybe you're already dead, and this is what the afterlife is... Scared yet? Well this could all happen to you any day, at any point of your life and in fact it has happened to me just now. It wasn't a dream a dream, and I'm not sure how I escaped. But I made sure I would no longer be set in that trap again. I remove Dell's Media Direct from my Windows Vista computer. Yes. You see, that new Vostro 1700 which has been giving me problems for about a month now, has two buttons which can be used to launch the computer. One of them has a little house on them, which is the Media Direct icon and the other bigger button is the standard start up button. It was dark, and by habit, I felt the keyboard and clicked on the first metal-like button I touched to start the computer. I wasn't even in front of the computer, I was on my way to picking up other stuff in another room. Upon my return, I noticed that I was stuck in Media Direct. Media Direct is a multimedia asset manager created by Dell. It allows you to access all your videos, your pictures, your music and even you Powerpoint presentations, all in one interface. It'S a clone of a similar program, with a black background developed by Apple. It attempts to be Windows Media Player and then some. Of course, Media Direct is pre-installed one every computers... by Dell. I was stuck in Media Direct and could not even shut down the computer. Nothing worked. I could navigate from "room" to "room" by going to the videos, music, and picture folders. I could see all these files which are not supposed to be visible to people on my computer, unless they have my password. Yes, everything in my My Documents was pretty much visible, only by booting up Media Direct, by-passing the normal Windows logon process... Now, I'm not a computing security expert. I use a computer often, but I'm no guru. I have a firewall and anti-virus installed. I figure that will do the job. I don't like Vista and I'm sure it's as insecure as it comes, but I never thought it would be that insecure. My other problem was getting out of the Media Direct mode. My mouse could work, but no right click options are available in Media Direct. There was no close program option available as the screen was maximized. After going from glass room to glass room, I noticed two new rooms. One was settings and the other one was exit. I clicked on exit and was stuck in this black window with nothing but my mouse cursor as a companion. Alt Tab worked, but showed only two windows menu which brought me back to the dark room. Control Alt Delete did not work. Neither did the escape or F1 to F12 keys. I could not even close the computer with the regular shut down button. I expected that my only way out of this mess, was to let the battery of the laptop starve and perhaps, I would have the option of rebooting. But there was always the risk, that rebooting, once the battery was dead, would bring me back into this dark room, all alone. After much clicking on everything, and keeping my finger on the start up button for a long time, the computer finally shut down, and I didn't have to wait for the battery to run out. I still don't know what combination did the job, but I know one thing for sure, the first thing I did when I booted up in normal mode was to remove Dell's Media Direct from this computer. I think you should do the same thing too.