Windows really is a POS!

Called over to a mate’s house on the way home from work to help him set up his new PC. Had tried to get him to buy an iMac but he’d already got a HP by the time my calls got through to him. Had to set him up with Unwired as well and figured it couldn’t be too bad. It took FOUR hours! Yes, FOUR!

OS was already installed, so just had to do some basic configuration (time, dat, langauge, etc). Had a quick look around to see that there was loads of junk installed – about 20 shite games and sign-ups for Telstra, Dodo, IPrimus and some other ISP too. Removed all those.

Installed Office 2003.

Installed Office 2003 SP2.

Got Unwired up and running. It’s crap! Despite good signal strength & quality it started off downloading Firefox at 4KB/s! Dumped the connection & tried again: 17KB/s. On a 512/128 plan!

Setup & configured the HP Printer/Scanner/Fax.

Deleted the demo version of Norton Security which came with the machine.

Installed the Trend Micro Security package he’d paid for.

Set up a schedule to check for updates.

Set up a schedule to scan for viruses.

Set up a schedule to scan for spyware.

Set up the firewall.

Thought I was nearly done, but no, I had yet to meet Windows Update. Fired that up, and it told me it needed to update itself. That done, it told me I needed to download 51 critical & highly recommended patches!!! 51! Took an hour to do that.

I came in towards the end and figured I’d set up a limited user for his day to day use. Fast user switching! Great, I’ll do that. Switched out of admin & did some configuration in his user account. Finished that, logged out and back in to Admin to see that Windows Update had refused to install the updates it had spent the last hour downloading!

You know that adage about the watched kettle never boiling? Turns out this Windows PC is the inverse: it will only do stuff if you sit there and watch it. Told it to do it again and thankfully it realised it had already done the downloads, so I left it installing update 13 of 51 and went home.

My conclusion: using Windows is what I imagine it would be like if you were looking after an ageing relative with mild Alzheimer’s; it’s fully functional, but gives the impression of never really being sure of what’s going on, and is liable to drive you insane.

BTW, XP Pro on a 3.0GHz Pentium D: slow! Lots of pregnant pauses if you tried to do two things at once.