Vista continues to haunt me!


The hard drive of one of the Dell laptops (an Inspiron 1420) in our department died so I ordered a brand new 500GB drive for it from NewEgg.com which arrived in a day. The hardware replacement was a piece of cake, but then it was time to rebuild the system. We are not using Windows 7 much here yet, so I do not have the media for it so I was ready to install XP SP3 on the laptop and give it back to the laptop's owner. "Oh no, I am used to Vista so you can just install that on it." Unfortunately, we do have copies of Windows Vista Business, so I went ahead and installed Vista on the laptop along with all the Vista drivers downloaded from the Dell support site. The system seemed to be running just fine. Then it was time to run the updates to make sure everything was all patched up safely. I initiated the windows update routine during lunchtime, around 12:30pm, thinking it would take maybe an hour since there were 93 updates weighing in at about 250MB to download. The downloads ended up taking nearly an hour themselves, but once that was done I was hoping the 2.2GHz Core 2 T7500 Inspiron with 4GB of DDR2 RAM could run all the installations and update itself in an hour or so. From the beginning the updates were installing quite slowly, but when they hit the .NET Framework 3.5 it seemed to stop all together. It must have been installing that one patch (#22 out of 93) for nearly an hour until it continued on to the next one. The whole ordeal was so slow, I just left the laptop sitting and "updating" itself overnight as I did other things, checking from time to time to see how it was progressing. By the time I left at around 4:30pm there were still about 20 updates to go.

Coincidentally just a few days ago I updated one of our Ubuntu servers which is running 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) and had not been rebooted in several months. Since I needed to reboot it to cleanly change its hostname, I went ahead and performed a full apt-get upgrade, (one line typed in a terminal shell session) which downloaded about 250MB as well, updating the kernel and over 200 other packages. The total time it took to download and install all 233 packages was 45 minutes and then it rebooted and was fully online again, serving out file shares and web requests without a hitch. Linux sure is complicated and difficult, isn't it?

One university co-worker who is another Linux geek is the fellow who purchased the ASUS tablet netbook I mentioned in my previous post. He asked me where was the online Linux-like repository for Windows 7 where he could just run a yum or apt-get like updater to find Windows 7 versions of all his software he used under XP. He is now used to Ubuntu or Fedora type repositories where everything you could possibly want can be scrolled in a GUI and you can just select whatever package you want and it gets downloaded and installed, and then you can just run an apt-get upgrade or yum upgrade command and everything gets updated. Ha, if only it were that simple. He said "I thought Windows 7 was supposed to be better". Sure in many ways it may be better than Vista, but when it comes to software installation and updates, it may not be better than Linux. I suppose you get what you pay for, but, wait a second, Ubuntu or Fedora do not cost you anything! I am now looking to spend money and purchase copies of Windows 7 to test and there are not only several versions to choose amongst, but also several different ways to purchase it (individual copies of Professional, or group licenses of Enterprise? Academic versus "Personal" pricing?) Yikes, it should not be so difficult to purchase an operating system! Why is free software so much easier than proprietary, commercial software?

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