Coming Tuesday: 5 Microsoft patches

Unidentified my eye

WGA

The mystery update

"a single high-priority, non-security update for an unidentified product"

could this be the long-awaited Ultimate Extras?

f@#king disgraceful

I re-installed Vista 64 on my home pc the other day, took the best part of 4 days to get all the patches installed.

Never as BUGGY as EVERY OS X Update!

History speaks for it's self ... Apple releases updates that are ALWAYS Buggy, something that YOU can't show proof of for Microsoft.

Here's the Apple Proof, just check it every other day! -

http://macfixit.com/

Where's your proof of equivalent (number of) buggy updates, Apple Kool Aid Drinkers???

f@#king disgraceful is full of BS!

I have a brand new HP DV6500 series Notebook (core 2 duo) and Vista Ultimate (64-bit) installed (I upgraded immediately from Home Premium) after purchase. I've had the notebook all of 7 weeks and have installed ALL the updates that MS has offered (not that many) and the TOTAL install time has been less than 25 minutes for all combined, via a STANDARD DSL connection.

Mr. "f@#king disgraceful" ("took the best part of 4 days to get all the patches installed."), either you are a blatant liar, a Mac user (one in the same) or you a still using a 300 baud modem Internet connection. I strongly suspect that you are both of the first two (liar and Mac user)

I was skeptical of going to Vista at first, since I have NEVER had a problem with Vista on any of my 5 other PC. Vista is elegant, has features Apple never dreamed of and frankly makes OS X Panther look like OS 9.

If I need more RAM for a project, all I have to do is plug in a "fast" USB Flash module and Vista "ReadyBoost" adds all or part of it to my internal RAM. Does Apple's piece of archaic crap OS X have that? NOT! With a 40x speed SanDisk 8GB Flash USB drive, I have 10GB of RAM. How much can you put in a MacBook Pro? What, it's not running cause you had to send it back to Apple again for repairs on the LCD?

And yeah, I use a few Macs at work (as we get rid of them) - IT Admin for a large school district.

"Webster Phreaky" Bill, is that you?

I'm not sure why your trolling webster, nobody has mentioned Apple yet...

I have 2 macs and a bunch of PCs, Can't say I've ever had a problem with Apple updates apart from that WGA problem a week or so back - oh wait, Apple doesnt have WGA

Newp *shrugs* no apple update problems here, intel or PPC... but then I dont have an iphone, ipod or any of the other crap thats not OSX related

@ Webster Phreaky

I see you are an "Admin for a large school district" so you are obviously used to being cr***ed on. But you are guilty of exactly the same...

I have patched nearly 100 Vista boxes recently, and for no apparent reason some doooo take much longer than others, even when same hardware and same factory disk image. (Yeah I can't figure that one out yet either.)

Best bit about your post is that you "claim" that plugging in your 8GB SanDisk UFD gives you 10GB RAM, maybe according to Vista... but have you actually bench-tested the performance benefit? I would bet you a "pint" that you actually see performance degradation over 2GB of physical RAM.

"READY-BOOST" does help but with lame under-powered boxes, shipping with 512MB of RAM running Vista "all bells and whistles". Your Windoze fanboi attitude is... well... mis-informed.

Wish I still worked in the education sector so I could get a sensible Netware server (running Netware, not SLES) for a super discount, rather than punting Windoze SBS boxes... I must have been evil in a previous life.

Regards,

Jimi A

@ f@#king disgraceful

How the fsk did it take you that long? Even my dad only took an hour to do his machine and he's not exactly the fastest when it comes to software stuff. Even if you had to download and install EVERY PATCH from the vista catalog it would take nowhere near 4 days to finish. Hell it'd take nowhere near 4 HOURS! You're either exaggerating by a marked degree or you're so full of it your eyes must be deep brown in colour.

@ ALL of you iLEMMINGS

You're ALL full of BS, everyone nose that OS X is just cr#ppy LINEX with a STUPID point and drool interface glued on top of it. And Steve nicked that from WINDOWS!!1! (Hey, guess who invented the window? THE CLUE is in the NAME!!1!) So STOP WHINING about Vista and take your iPHONEYs back to steve while you can still get your money back.

Man, you lemmings are so STUPID.

Updating nightmares

Some of the OEM distros do send you randomly backwards and forwards to the Windows Update site, Intel website and their own websites for what should be straight forward updates (for example try updating a bunch of Dell laptops with the new Intel driver for the integrated 845GM chipset which came out about a month ago). Depending on your broadband providor (think of all of us using "3".......) multiple FTP downloads are automatically throttled so you could quite easily spend 16-17 hours downloading stupid updates that should take minutes in the real world.

As for the Mac bashing here- whats the problem? I use XP, Vista, Ubuntu & OS 10.4 on different systems. Perhaps I've been lucky with Mac- but other than crappy flexes on their power supplies that I've had to replace every few months, they tend to be as easy to use and update as the Ubuntu box (which is pretty easy). Vista on the other hand- I've still a stack of legacy devices (including an integrated sound chip on a brand new Inspiron 6400) that are not supported. At least you can run any old crap in Windows 95 compatibility mode on an XP box- you cannot do this in Vista. Mac OS 10.4 has the equivalence of compatibility mode (Classic support) which just tends to work (though it can be a bitch to configure initially and may require installing old versions of the OS ontop of new versions......)

Different people like different operating systems, some people like multiple OSes for different purposes (like me). I am not trying to sell Mac OS or Vista- I know they can be dogs- but each has their place in the real world. Now, can we ever stop the bitch slapping about OS 10.4 versus Vista etc. please.

S.

School admin or School Boy?

That webster phreaky bloke keeps popping up on these comment lists, he's not worth replying to, all he wants is to cause trouble.

Could be a Reg plant designed to make things 'more' interesting :-)

I too have Vista and I do have to say, it is pretty good, and that's comming from a 15 year *NIX veteran admin!

So far the patching hasn't been too bad, it is definitely better than my previous XP box but I guess only time shall tell.

@WP

Christ, if you're gonna troll, at least try to make it worth reading by injecting the occasional fact into your pointless diatribes - the concept of a desktop & window metaphor in computer user interfaces came out of research by Xerox at their Palo Alto Research Center, the results of which were demonstrated in 1975, the very same year that MSFT was founded.

Admin or student?

Why must it be one or the other - I've seen low-budget school districts where the students ARE the admins; if only because the school can't afford to hire a real one.

And because I enjoy the occasional unintended trivia contest, I'll try and answer Webster Phreaky's question:

Who invented the [computer] window? The good people at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Apple got ideas from Xerox, Microsoft got ideas from Apple, and now nearly everyone's got a graphical interface.

I miss the command line. A much more elegant interface, from a more civilized age.

What this all about???

``Microsoft patches??''

What the hell is a ``microsoft''??

Couldn't be too important, if I've never heard of it.

@ f@#king disgraceful

I love how you say Apple nicked the point-and-click interface from Windows.

Who invented the mouse? Apple. Kinda useful for point-and-click.

Incidentally, before you flame me into a charred heap of RegReader, I have a Linux (Arch) box, a Windows (XP64) box and an Apple (OSX) box. I'm using the x64 box right now, as it's my main box.

Get it right, fanboys

QUOTE: "Who invented the mouse? Apple."

Yeah? You checked that, did you? Actually, the original 'x-y co-ordinate pointing device' (a mouse to you and me) was invented at PARC in the early 70s as an adjunct to a putative GUI for Xerox photocopiers.

However, Steve Jobs is *probably* the person who did most to popularise the mouse as a periheral on GUI 'soho' computers.

As to "kinda useful for point and click", so is a touch screen or a stylus or, dare I suggest, the tab key and enter key. But the mouse seems to have become universal - I'm not sure why because for many tasks, keyboard shortcuts are far quicker.

But, hey, WTF would I know? I'm just a sceptical sour-faced *old* person.

ReadyBoost

ReadyBoost sounds like it's just using the Flash as swapspace. You can do that in OSX or any other Unix, as well as Linux, but nobody's thought to make an easy GUI over it.

It's not that great an idea though. For one thing, that's going to wear down the Flash memory very, very fast. Flash has limited writing ability, that's why you should run journaled filesystems on it. Shortens the life.

Actual RAM is cheaper and far, far, far, far faster than Flash and it lasts. There's no competition.

This is not coming from a fanboy of anything. I regularly use Windows, OSX, Linux and IRIX.

P.S. I'm pretty sure the latter Webster Whatshisnuts post ("WINDOWS INVENTED THE WINDOW!!") was a joke posted by someone mocking the previous one.

@ Sceptical B'stard

"As to "kinda useful for point and click", so is a touch screen or a stylus or, dare I suggest, the tab key and enter key."

I wouldn't dare if I were you.

"point & click" is a UI control method that provides instant access to any window/field/control that is visible on the screen.

The tab key provides an alternate control method that (usually) relies on a preconfigured sequence to 'move' about the screen.

Do not confuse function with method :-)

Think of the children!

Gee... If that idiot is really an admin for schools, I fear for the kids (windows invented by... Windows!?). I hope "he" doesn't come anywhere near them, at least. Bloody semi-literate troll. Yeah, "everyone nose" my nose... and I suspect OSX has nothing to do with LINEX (wtf?). Brand new notebook, PCs, right... I suspect all you have is some nasty venereal disease messing with what's left of your brain.

Logical fallacy

To have a nasty venereal disease, he'd have to have gotten laid first. Even if you reason by the absurd, it can't happen. ;-)

I can't believe there is still an OS argument going on

Really, you are all a bunch of school kids - my OS is better than your OS, but my OS did this first, yeah but mind did this better!! Really!!

At the end of the day, each OS suites an individual - just for starters, everyone uses the "desktop" in a different way or likes their "start menu" organised differently. Competition and difference is only a good thing for the market.

Think of it like a car - every car does the same thing (essentially, drives you from a to b), just that each car has a different set of features inside, etc. Not everyone likes the same car, and not everyone needs the same set of features, etc.

(For the record, use windows XP at work, Ubuntu at home both have pros and cons!)