The joys of rebuilding a PC

Posted by Al Twohill on 17 January 2008 | 0 Comments

Tags: desktop, ubuntu, windows

Installing update 1 of 86... Do not power off or unplug your computer...

Sigh. Actually, I'm not really that worried that there are lots of updates. For one thing, it shows that there are still some developers active at Microsoft (they didn't all get put off by Steve Ballmer). What does annoy me is the number of system restarts I need to do to get Windows up and running. So far, I restarted for the second stage of install, at the end of install, three times for my Asus motherboard driver installs, once for my ATi install, and twice for Windows Updates. Thats, er nine restarts just to get to the point I can start to install my apps and games (and many of those will 'need' restarts too!). It annoys me how so many software developers put arbitrary restart prompts at the end of their un/install processes. They just don't need to! Windows can restart individual services like Linux can too, and files that are still in use can bloody well stay there until I choose to restart thanks!

Lets contrast that with Kubuntu shall we? I put the CD in and the operating system loads. All by itself. No restarts so far. I choose to permanently install and go through the wizard. At the end, I get the choice of restarting into the installed system or staying on the Live version for now. And if I click restart later, I'm not prompted every ten minutes to restart (on a timed prompt that if you miss it, your computer restarts no less). Once I finish what I was doing (oh yes, I was surfing the net while I was installing the operating system - bugger watching glorified statements from Microsoft saying how good the operating system is while installing), I restart my computer. And there we are!! That was, ah, one restart if I counted right. True, I didn't count doing my updates afterwards (and there are quite a lot) but they don't need restarts. Either the update is applied automatically, or in the case of core system bits like the kernel, it paitently waits until the next time you restart.

And they say Linux isn't ready for the desktop....