Kids do anything for free stuff. That includes clicking on ads for toy or game things, etc. Cryptomining, maybe, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s just an app to them by Razr.
The bigger question here, at least to me, is why this isn’t a big deal to you? Should other companies do this if it’s opt-in?
What makes this a good deal for Razr customers, regardless of age?
Why would a company doing scummy things to grab more cash be a big deal to me?
That’s always been how most companies operate. It isn’t good, but it isn’t new, either.
Logitech always want to update it on my Macbook Pro too, so not just Win10.
Some companies may do scummy things, and we tend to vote with our wallets or uproar about it if it is truly bad. I don’t own Razr stuff so it’s easy for me to be indifferent. But for sure if a company like Logitech did this, I would have a problem.
Except in this case the parent isn’t buying anything, other than the computer in the first place. The kid just downloads this free app and suddenly the household’s power bill goes up by 2X. You’d have to be some kind of crazy helicopter parent to monitor everything your kid is downloading on his PC.
Razer is at real risk of getting in trouble for this reason. This is why App stores have parental controls available.
That’s for sure, nobody here is saying Razer didn’t do anything scummy.
I’d still expect parents to at least take some notice before too much damage is being done, though. Something like the PC running non-stop (even when sleeping, in school, …), for example.
How would you know before you get your power bill? Parents don’t search kids’ rooms daily. If you have a 12-15 year old kid, you should probably be giving them some sort of privacy and trust.
I’m telling you, in about 30 days, there are going to be stories about this and Razer is going to be in trouble.
Oh, come on! There is a difference between searching a kid’s room daily and noticing the PC has seemingly been running non-stop, even if the kid is currently somewhere else.
Don’t know about your parents, but mine tought me to shut down stuff I’m not currently using. So something like that would simply be noticed without hurting someone’s privacy.
“Hey, I noticed your PC was running all day while you were gone. You downloading something?” “No, it’s for Razer!” “Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…?!”
Then again, don’t kids these days just waste away on their phones all the time instead of using a proper rig? Maybe they aren’t the target audience after all ;)
Wouldn’t surprise me, either.
I mean my PCs have been run 24/7 since I was probably about 13. I’m genuinely a little at a loss every time I come home now to find that Win10 has rebooted me without explanation; remembering what all I have running at any given moment and getting it all back up was a pretty rare experience for me until this OS!
Was there an actual reason for that? And your parents didn’t mind? Too much money?
Don’t get me wrong, please, I just find that a bit… shocking.
It did give you an explanation, you just weren’t there to read the “Hey! I’ll shut down your PC in 10 minutes for an update I’ll tell you absolutely nothing about!”
Yeah… we’ve all been hit by that. Many times, too…
My PC is on all the time. I have the monitors going to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, but otherwise it’s up all the time. It’s not like you notice 2 extra bucks on the power statement, if it’s even that much. Now, if my PC was jacked up to 100% CPU usage for 24 hours a day 7 days a week, probably a very different story.
But most parents aren’t going to look at their growing power bill and immediately think “I bet this is because of that mouse Timmy got for Christmas” either.
I didn’t even think about the fact that the cause of the higher power bill won’t even be obvious to parents. Ugh, that’s going to cause some headaches for them as they try to figure out why their bill went from $75-$200, and it’s not like the power company is going to know.
Modern OS will wake the PC up in 10 seconds. Drivers are stable now. Save the earth.
Windows 10 makes me log in every time I wake up my PC from sleep every since an update a few months back. Nothing I’ve tried gets around this. It’s maddening.
I mean in some cases it was because I was doing things, like leaving the PC on all night on Napster. I was young and foolish, okay? :P
But most of the time, it’s just been to avoid the hassle of rebooting or even waking from sleep. Both are just a time-sink that I’d rather not deal with, and like Scott said, I can afford the few extra bucks of electricity.
“But Mando the new ess ess dees are so fast for the booting!”
Meh, my mobo BIOS splash screen + windows loading + all my on-boot software loading + reopening browsers, documents, music, chat clients, etc. is actually pretty time-consuming.
Hell the chat client thing alone. I love having the last few weeks’ worth of message history with most of my friends a scroll away.
Win10 is decidedly more aggressive about it. It’s genuinely increased by system reboots/year by at least double, maybe as much as triple. Ugh.
Napster! Ah… you brought me good memories :) Some dirty ones, too. Hehe…
There is a way to suppress it’s self-appointed reboots. And for now, it works, because I have done it and I almost never restart and when I do, it’s manually (and that’s when I see there are updates waiting to install).
It’s been awhile since I set it up, but I think these are the instructions I used:
You don’t reboot, you suspend. W10 is surprisingly stable.
That said… I have the bad habit of leaving games running on steam for the same lazy reasons.
I mean technically, I actually bought a copy of Win10 for Ed through my job, which ostensibly has much more granular control of things like the reboots built-in if you don’t mind a little tinkering with Group Policy and. . .
. . .
Right, yes, I am lazy. Hence the ongoing reboots.
Why are you even rebooting? Let the PC go suspend is what I’m saying. When you get up from a PC, hit Win-L to lock it, it will go to sleep by itself. Sit back down, log in, continue doing whatever it is you wanted.