Dear beloved Massassians,

Long story short, I've got my old laptop back from a mate who needed it and I've just reformatted and reinstalled XP because I can use it to run a couple of work related programs which aren't available on OSX (Cellular beam design packages for anyone who's interested).

Here cometh the rant:

1) Why can't the installer ask me all the questions in one go? Why can it not just install without pausing to tell me it can't find an internet connection and should it skip on, or asking me what ****ing time zone I live in? Can't these things wait until the OS is up and running?

2) Service Pack 2. I love it, but why is getting it such a ****ing pain in the arse? From clicking on Windows Update it goes like this:

a) Windows update needs updating!
b) Download and install Windows Update update.
c) Check for critical installs - find 2 random small things.
d) Download and install the 2 little things. Reboot.
e) Check for critical installs - SP2! Huzzah!
f) Spend 10 minutes looking at a blue progress bar telling me "Preparing to Download". WTF?!
g) SP2 is currently downloading. This is coming from my mac. I'll just go upstairs and see where it's got up to.
h) Download failed. Start again. At least this time it's skipped the "Preparing to Download" bit.

What a steaming pile of ****ing turd.

And after this is finally complete, I get to go and download AVG Free, Spybot Search and Destroy, Ad-Aware, Firefox, WinAmp and every other bit of software I need to get it up to a stable working condition.

So now that I've got your attention are there any other bits of software I should play with on this machine? It's not a great PC by any means, but things like Chrome and other random apps that I will have missed in the last 3 years of Mac only living might make my urge to kill wane slightly...

Love,

Mantrain

xxxx

I agree completely.

Of all the things that could be said about Vista, its installer does a decent job of addressing 1.

I think he need a hot shirtless hunk on your desktop, but other than that, you should be good to go.

Martyn, it sounds like you're having some trouble with the pre-keyboard interface.

Macs FTW

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

Taskbar shuffle.
Launchy.
Foobar2000.

When you get used to some of the awesome stuff on other operating systems, Windows really does piss you off.

And when you realize most other operating systems are worthless, you go back to Windows!

1) I don't agree that being asked some questions during the OS install process is particularly a problem. They are, as you say, questions that have to be asked sooner or later. I personally don't see what difference it makes.

2) There are other ways. You could download the SP3 (might as well get SP3 rather than SP2) installer exe itself from the microsoft site and just install that by running it. Or even use nLite to slipstream SP3 onto a copy of your old Windows CD so that when you install Windows off of the new copy you have SP3 pre-installed. Though I can't really say much about any long "preparing to download" pause as I've never experienced it myself. Guess there something wrong with the connection to the update server?

I'd also like to go off on a semi-off-topic rant if I may.

When Microsoft tries to bundle its own software with its OS - software that is of a similar quality to the best competing third-party products available - they get sued and labelled "anti-competitive" (I'm thinking of IE and Netscape here). The result? MS doesn't make any effort to bundle high quality apps as a part of Windows. It's gotten to the point where MS aren't even going to bother including stuff like a basic email client or photo editor in Windows 7 at all. Given the situation, it makes sense - there's no point in supporting a half-arsed application (half-arsed because it's the best it's allowed to be before the lawsuits arrive) when everyone who is actually interested in using that kind of application will just get a more full-fledged product instead of the built-in Windows one.

But when Apple bundles high-quality, 3rd-party-competitor-beating software with every copy of its OS (iLife, etc.), they gets praised to high heaven... seems it's OK because they don't have a monopoly (yet?).

...

Back on topic. VLC is a nice media player to have. Perhaps you've already thought of it though.

none of that stops ms from making high quality apps and giving them away free online.

GHarris is right on about the anti-competitive threat that Microsoft has to deal with. They have literally had to dumb-down bundled products because they're at such a high risk to get sued.

Windows. Some say its actully a virus, and it also cries wolf. But at least you can get software to work with it :). It gets on my nerves when it decides it wants to update itself and insist on rebooting the darn computer. It also has that terrible tendency to do what it likes when youre doing something else...

Windows XP. You love it and hate it at the same time.

Windows. Some say its actully a virus, and it also cries wolf. But at least you can get software to work with it :). It gets on my nerves when it decides it wants to update itself and insist on rebooting the darn computer. It also has that terrible tendency to do what it likes when youre doing something else...

Windows XP. You love it and hate it at the same time.

Hi GHarris, I don't think I've come across you before. Nice to have new faces round here.

For the bit I've quoted the problem is the whole thing takes about 45 minutes, which I would have absolutely no problem with, because it's very easy to go find something to do in those 45 minutes, apart from the fact it needs you to check it every 10 minutes or so to make sure it hasn't stopped to ask you a stupid question.

I've been out of the windows market so long I didn't even know there was an SP3! If that is the case, then why doesn't Windows Update just point me there, rather than sending me to get SP2 first? I suppose once I've got the wireless card working then I can revisit Windows Update (the wired connection is upstairs where Izzy (my fiancée) is sleeping, so I'm trying to use my Mac to get the drivers and stuff and USB stick it over to the windows laptop).

I've got VLC on my mac, but I'll give those other bits a look through once I'm up and running.

Oh, and I totally agree with you about the bundled software. OSX only gets away with it because of its small market share but frankly their built in apps are fantastic (Mail, Safari, iTunes, iPhoto and all that jazz). Although like NoEsc said, at least they offer most online for free.

Prime example: Windows just caused me to double-post, god knows why. I even had to reboot the darn system

Windows is a curse to us all...

Aha! The wireless is now working! Huzzah!

Now it's off to Windows Update again, and AVG land...

Windows. Only as smart as the person between the mouse and keyboard

whats the point in avg and all that anit-spyware crap anyway..

Dunno. I've always used them since I've known about them and they've always kept my machines running tickety-boo.

None of them run in the background - I just do periodical scans with them.

Since I've got SP2 on, I've now had to download two, then another twenty-two updates.

And none of them are SP3 yet....

EDIT:

Reboot - oh-ho what's this?

SEVENTY MORE UPDATES?!

FFS can't they bundle all this crap up?

EDIT II:

Finally it seems to be finished. No more critical updates needed. Woop.

Man, Vista seems soo much better in this regard. At least the way I run it. Since SP1, its been quite nice. Yeah, its still slower, but that's kinda to be expected when Vista uses more resources than XP. But, that's why I got the quad-core processor and 4 gigs of RAM. To be used.

I installed XP Pro on my parents' computer recently. I don't think I'll ever go back.

Have not had to encounter Vista yet...
But will do

People who don't know how to edit Windows Update settings ITT.

That's not really true. Vista generally runs faster than XP on fast systems and slower than XP on slow systems. Having things like prioritized IO, an accelerated UI (Aero), and more aggressive memory management (SuperFetch) go a long way to making the system more responsive and more useful.

I've only seen Vista on slow machines so far. I would quite like to have a play on a decent system to see what it's really like.

SP2 includes all the fixes and patches from SP1, but SP3 does not include SP2 or SP1, so you need to install SP2 before SP3.

And yeah, installing all the patches sucks. Better to slipstream everything into an install disc:

1) Every patch, service pack, or hotfix installed after the OS install takes up 3x the space a slipstreamed version would. 1x: The patch is installed. 2x: The original file is backed up so you can uninstall the patch. 3x: A backup of the new file is made so Windows File Protection can restore it (since it can't restore from the CD).
2) Installing SP2 on top of SP0 resulted in a huge decrease in boot time for me, with no other changes to the OS. Slipstreaming SP2 in and installing that as a fresh Windows brought the boot time in line with SP0 (this is what really sold me).
3) You don't have to redownload and reinstall patches every time you install Windows.
4) Install time for the slipstreamed OS is going to be comparative to the non-slipstreamed one, so you cut out all that time patch hunting.

nLite/vLite rules since you can also strip out components from Windows XP/Vista that you don't want, which cuts down on the disc size and install time, and OS disk space usage, as well as can speed up the OS with some smart pruning. I have a Vista VM which runs almost as fast as my host XP OS (and this is without any hardware accelerated virtualization) although the price for this is that the OS feature set is now less than XP's.

This is why I use ghost discs. Reinstall time determined by how fast my dvd drive reads.

I'd install CCleaner.

...what?

Ta for that MaZZT - I'm only going to be using this machine from time to time, but I'll try and set that up for next time.