XP SP3 - Not Soon Enough!!!
Well in my last blog post I talked about my recent positive experience with Vista Ultimate 64bit. Now I must talk about a negative experience I go through nearly every day with Windows XP.
When was the last time you installed XP from scratch? Being that the bulk of my job is fixing peoples broken and messed up computers, I tend to install Windows XP from scratch pretty often. A year or two ago when I would do a full new install of XP it would usually mean about 85 updates including all hardware and non critical updates. One or two years ago that was a lot. But now I have a computer up on my bench that is in the process of installing all of it's Windows XP updates. So far it has downloaded 105 updates and is currently installing number 42 out of those 105 updates.
One Hundred and Five updates people, that is a freakin lot. Now I could be wrong, but the way I understand it, when Microsoft releases a new service pack for a Windows operating system, that service pack usually includes most if not all of the latest updates available on the Windows Update website. For example, right now if you do a fresh install of Windows SP2, you already have all the critical and non critical updates from the original XP, XP SP1 and all the updates up until the release of SP2. But just because you installed the latest version of the operating system doesn't mean new updates haven't been released since your copy of Windows was released. So after your done installing the operating system you need to head over to the Windows Update website and get all the most recent updates that your system doesn't have yet.
Now do you wanna hear the kicker in all this? Once I am done installing all those 105 updates on my customers computer, I have to restart the system and go back to the Windows Update website to get the updates for the updates I just installed. Fun hunh? The number of updates for updates you need usually depends on how many of the original optional updates you get. For my customers I usually get everything available since I usually don't know what each and every customer uses his or her computer for. That being the case, the number of updates for updates I have to get usually hovers around 11 or 12 depending on the hardware of the computer.
This is why I am anxiously awaiting the release of XP SP3. I imagine that once SP3 hits the Windows Update website, the number of critical updates that we will need to download will decrease. But at the moment, right before the release of SP3, those of us who make our living off of fixing computers will have to deal with the nearly 1 hour or more of time it takes to get all those updates and install them on a system that is 4 plus years old.
This same thing goes for Vista. Vista SP1 is so close to the Windows Update website we can smell it. Have you purchased a new computer with Vista lately? It can take the better part of an hour to download all those updates and get them installed. SP1 for Vista will be welcomed by many a bench tech in the industry.