Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.
— Rita Mae Brown
Windows… Ugh
My hat’s off today to the guy who packaged Windows Patch KB951847. An update to the .net Framework. There’s three hours of my life that I won’t get back. Just as a general rule I want to know how to turn Windows Update off completely. The Mac OS X’s update is smart. It pops up sometime during the day and says that there are updates. Then it give me the option of downloading them. It lives under the Apple Menu so it’s always easy to find. About 90% of the time I say not right now and then do the update manually within a day or two. On the other hand: windows update complains loudly if I try to make it emulate the same behaviour. It’s constantly putting up a little red shield in the system tray and then putting up a balloon to say “You turned me off, what are you crazy”. It seems reasonably obvious that Windows does not know it’s place in my computing world and more so, doesn’t understand why it got put there in the first place. On my Machine Windows is a VM under Parallels. I’ll start it once every six months or so when openning a Word doc or excel spreadsheet and I’m trying to work around a bug in OpenOffice.org or I just don’t feel like using iWork. That’s pretty much him. I’ll run Windows Update when something breaks but since Windows is a distance also-ran on my computer that won’t be frequent. As to why it got there.Window’s behaviour in the first place is the issue. Insistant system tray applications constantly stealing my screen real estate. Update that were written by crettins who thought to try and save me time by not sending a complete package and an attitude towards system failures that would have stranded Jim Lovell on the Dark Side of the Moon are pretty much all it took to convince me to buy a Mac.