Ah yes, been there done that. Whole weekends can whistle by while you upgrade, install or fix Xp. My world is becoming less MS every day, not out of absurd stubbornness but out of necessity. My advice today is don't install IE7, it gets to about 5 or 6 tabs or windows and then it just goes crazy - wildly bloating in size (memory utilisation) until you can't do a damn thing. Now Fire-Fox is my default browser and its staying that way.

Well, much as I like Firefox, it's not the most bloat-free browser, not at all. I've been thinking I need a new Mac Pro just so I don't have to restart Firefox every two days or so to get it to leave some resources for the odd instance of Photoshop that I sometimes like to run.

But I must say the last time I had to help friends or family with Windows, I vowed never again. I can just feel the will to live drain away as I face that screen, knowing that it will be hours of sheer frustration. It's not worth it.

Yeah, try running five or six applications as well as Firefox, minimising Firefox, doing stuff in the other apps for a while, locking your PC, unlocking it again, then maximising Firefox. The time taken for Firefox to crank itself back up to speed enough that it'll even react to your keystrokes is unbelievable. Thing is, it's such a bloody great browser that it's worth it. But, if anything, IE's quicker and more efficient.

You need to get hold of an SP2 CDR, they were made widely available at the time of its release. First, install XP. Then put the SP2 CD in and install SP2, then log on to Live Update and do the rest of the updates. You'll save hours.
The problem with doing it all online is that the update website doesn't necessarily download all the updates for a freshly installed OS in the correct order, hence the silly error warnings.
Still, I agree with your general point, it shouldn't be like that.

Oh, and, "So why is it that, having installed all these updates, the first thing the newly upgraded XP tells me is that I need to download and install urgent updates?"
Come on, I know that you're just letting off steam, and that you already know the answer to that question. The computer doesn't even know that it needs to install update 'B' until the changes made by update 'A' tell it so, by asking the question "if x is present, does y happen?", which the computer doesn't ask until update 'A' tells it to ask. But you know all that.

Firefox is a great browser, but there is a cross-platform standards compliant browser out there that is even better.

Opera.

Give it a try - you might find you like it.

David,

I did try Opera once, for about ten minutes — that's nine-and-a-half minutes longer than the time it took to utterly piss me off. Browser-wise, it is simply the biggest pile of shite there is. It's even worse than bloody Safari. Safari may not work, but at least it's pretty.


Tom,

> you already know the answer to that question. The computer doesn't even know that it needs to install update 'B' until the changes made by update 'A' tell it so

Yes, and?

Look, update A and update B aren't independent. The changes made by update A which tell the PC that it needs update B were programmed by the same people who built the Windows Update website. If update A contains the information that update B is needed, then there is no sensible reason why Windows Update shouldn't contain the information that update B should be downloaded along with update A.

All you've done here, Tom, is reword my complaint, not answer it.

I eventually got sick enough of Windows to switch to a shiny new MacBook, which is ace.

My copy of XP crashes every time I click on a avi file (even just a single click to highlight it) as well as having numerous other big flaws which piss me off immensely. I really, really hope that Vista is half-decent, as I'd like to have a Windows machine in the house that doesn't give me blood lust. If it's anything like Messenger Live or Hotmail Live, I'm not holding my breath, as they're both almost exactly the same as older incarnations, but a bit shinier and far, far slower.

Shite.

Um, I never thought that you were seriously looking for someone to suggest an "answer", Squander. But I'll have a go:
As I see it, the cause of the problem (updates being out of synch with each other) is that Microsoft is a huge organisation. There ar probably scores of departments working on different "bug fixes", and they are not properly communicating with each other to unify their approach to updates. The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, so to speak, hence the error messages. Actually, I find the same thing happening with my anti-virus software, if I reinstall XP from scratch - AVG requires a massive update, then another one, then another.
The diagnosis would seem to be that there are too many cooks spoiling the broth. The solution would at first seem to be "scale down the whole operation - have one small department assigned to working on the updates". But could Windows XP have evolved from Windows 98 if Microsoft was a smaller organisation than it is? I'm not sure. It's a trade-off situation. XP is broadly "fit for purpose" and it broadly works, because so many diverse departments collaborated in its creation. If Microsoft had remained a tiny concern, there would likely be no XP to moan about in the first place. The downside is that we have to put up with the inevitable results of different departments which lack an effective unification when it comes to bug-fixing patches.
I still think I gave effective time-saving advice when I said, get hold of an SP2 CD-R and use that to install SP2 immediately after the initial installation of XP. That's what I do, and a full, clean installation of XP has never taken me 3 hours to complete.

> I never thought that you were seriously looking for someone to suggest an "answer"

I wasn't. But you gave one.


> The solution would at first seem to be "scale down the whole operation - have one small department assigned to working on the updates".

No, this is nonsense. You seem to think I'm talking about really complex in-depth information here, but I'm not: all I'm suggesting is that if an update is for SP2, that it be downloaded along with SP2. The Windows Update website already contains loads of information about what's in each update, so the problem is not a failure to pass on information from whoever programmed the update to whoever maintains the site; and it is not even a decision not to pass on this particular piece of information, since the information we're talking about is clearly typed there on the site: each update's label does tell you whether it's for XP, 2000, SP1, or whatever. No, this is a decision not to bother bringing the Windows Update site up to scratch, because to do so would cost Microsoft some money and save them zero time and zero money, though it would save their customers lots of time and inconvenience.

And that's fair enough, in some ways: Microsoft know that most of their customers will stick with them; someone's probably made the calculation that custom lost through this inconvenience is worth less than the cost of removing it. Most people stick with what they're comfortable with. But me, I was always more comfortable with Macs anyway, so I'm one of the customers Microsoft has made the decision not to care about losing. And they lost me on Sunday. Which is a bit of a fuck-up, really, since, though I love Macs, I'm not one of the die-hard tunnel-visioned Microsoft-hating Macboys, and I really rather like XP most of the time. But not enough to put up with having half my weekend destroyed.

Apple, incidentally, are a large and complex organisation with lots of different departments. OSX has an automatic update feature. It is quick, efficient, and doesn't tell you you need new updates immediately after you've run all the latest updates.

By the way, here's the reason it took me three hours. SP2 took about an hour to install, which is insane, but hey. Right at the end of the installation, it hit a spybot that I'd forgotten to turn off and therefore couldn't make one change to the registry. My mistake. But instead of giving me a retry option, the upgrader insisted that all it could do was to completely undo the SP2 installation, which took as long as it had to install. Then, when it had finished, I had to start again from scratch. What I should have been able to do was switch off the bot and click "Retry", taking twenty seconds instead of two hours and a warning message that XP might not work any more. Why in hell's name that wasn't an option, I have no idea.

Browser-wise, I now use Camino (which is a Mac OS 10 only Mozilla browser). I can get a bit flakey when I have more than 20 open windows, but at least I'm able to use the Java formatters that come with Blogger, Joomla, etc. which I cannot do with Safari. I wish Apple would fix this because Safari is by far the quickest at page rendering).

And, being a trouble-shooter for both PCs and Macs, there really is no comparison for ease of use. Macs are not perfect, but compared to the stupidities of Windows (no, I don't want to create a "new network place" I just want you to connect automatically, you bastard!) they are a joy.

DK

UPDATE: I have now switched to Flock, which only takes up about 80MB of RAM, rather than Camino's 200MB...

DK

I'll have a look at that.