Vista

Wonder OS powers ... Activate!! Shape of a retarded sloth. Form of a bucket of forgotten dreams.

 Installed vista on a box today. Activated it online. It downloaded over half a gigabyte of updates. It took over two and a half hours to get them installed. it did only take a second or two to get the machine activated.

 Vista is not that bad. I have not had to use it for a long time. I've only set it up and handed it off to others to suffer through. The only real complaint I have is the default color scheme. I cannot frigging read white on blue. How often do I need to complain about that on this blog? When you use the high contrast color schemes, Explorer and other programs automatically kick their graphics in to high contrast mode. I suppose you can turn that off, but it makes the Internet useless.

 With Linux, I can completely upgrade from one version to another online. I've done it many times and complained about it on this blog. It is a one or two command thing. It does take a long time, but it is relatively fire and forget. With that amount of updates to Vista, one might as well download an entire new OS and install it. It is an operation that takes several steps the way it is and you have to babysit the installs. "You could walk away and go get a sandwich or something but you have to agree to are ridiculous EULA half way through everything so sit down and enjoy the unresponsive progress bars you victim of the monopolistic machine!!!"

 The first round of updates went quickly. One emergency update to Vista and then reboot. The second batch took an over an hour to download and install. Reboot. Then came Vista service pack 2. While service pack 2 was installing, I was thinking how log it has been since service pack 2 came out and wondering how may more updates have been implemented since then. Reset. There was only one more round of updates thankfully.

The install ended up being 24 gigabytes after installing a few basic programs. 24 frigging gigabytes for an OS and OpenOffice. What the hell? I kicked off a Ghost image as I walked out the door. Hopefully the other eleven machines I need to set up like this one will be a bit less stressful.