Max Barry helped a brother-in-law build a PC and then install the OS. On Windows XP:
But what really bothers me is the feeling that you must constantly fight for control of your own computer, because your aims are apparently in conflict with those of Microsoft and half of everyone else who writes Windows software. They want your computer to report information about you, keep ongoing watch over what you’re doing in case you turn pirate (activation, registration, and validation?), show you ads, and lock you out of protected media. If you lose this battle, then six months later you find yourself with a computer so clogged with malware that the only way to make it usable again is to reinstall the operating system and begin the fight again.
Do we need another term beyond Foucault’s biopolitics (bios) or Lazzarato’s Noopolitics (nous) relating to the quasi-biopolitical nature of the ‘war’ fought against ‘infections’ to one’s computer? It is straight up technology and does not pertain to ‘life’ in any straightforward sense, but like an inverse to Latour’s use of the notion of a ‘plug-in’ to describe the constitution of subjectivity, surely the ‘personal computer’ in part now constitutes what it means to be personal on a whole different bunch of levels and therefore the constitution of one’s life as part of the reproduction of much larger population groups is dependent on having a non-infected and functioning PC?