OK, a couple of months ago, I decided to leave my piracy days youthful indiscretions behind me and subscribe to a legal music-streaming service.  Rhapsody was being a pain, and I kinda liked the funky ad that Yahoo music had with Green Day performing, looking like the little bit-block characters I remembered so fondly from my early days of playing games on computers (I’m talking pre-VGA here … CGA or EGA … hell, we were so thrilled when computers came with (gasp!) color monitors!). 

So I signed up for Yahoo Music.  Which has turned out to be an astonishingly ill-behaved application.

Translation:

IT CRASHED MY GODDAM COMPUTER!!!

OK, here’s how it went down.  When you get Yahoo Music, you don’t just get the music program.  Oh, no.  That would be too easy.  Instead, Yahoo helpfully crams all this other shit onto your hard drive and then jams it into your startup menu and system registry, tying up memory and clock cycles. Every time you boot up a computer with Yahoo Music on it, the first thing that happens is that you get Yahoo Messenger starting up on the right-hand side.  It logs you in and shows you who else is online.  Then it starts pimping out Yahoo News.  And up comes a reminder that you have Yahoo Mail.  Wheee!  What a pantload of fun.

So yesterday, as my computer trudged through its boot-up process, it finally said “Enough is enough.”  And locked.  Trying to click to dismiss Yahoo Messenger: No way.  Trying to reboot: Useless.  I hard-rebooted about a dozen times, trying to go into the startup files until I could get to a place where I could reboot from that didn’t have all this shit clogging up the system.

Warning: Tortured metaphor ahead:

Yahoo Music, as an application, is like having a houseguest that:
1.  Invites all his freeloading friends to come over too.
2.  Immediately takes over rooms in your house and rearranges the furniture so that his friends are more comfortable.
3.  Him and his buddies clean out your fridge
4.  They start answering the phone and routing all kinds of junk telemarketer calls to you when you’re trying to work.
5.  They invite in salesmen and have them try to sell you useless shit you don’t need when you’re trying to work.
6.  They crack you on the head everytime the mailman comes
7.  They run up your utility bills and start screwing with your other housemates.
8.   They thumb their nose at the cops (Norton Utilities) when you call them in to try to get them to calm down.

Basically, Yahoo Music is like having the Hell’s Angels move in to your house.

Even Norton couldn’t deal with them.  I tried booting from the Norton disks directly.  Uh-uh.  That was a bad feeling, especially since I have been editing video all week, and haven’t (I know: no backups=dumbass me) put the vid files on my external Seagate 300 gig drive.

At last, I managed to get my keyboard working.  The mouse steadfastly refused to do anything.  I used the tab keys to go through the Start menu to get to the Uninstall Programs menu. 

Adios, Yahoo Music!  I won’t miss you one goddam bit.