Why is Windows update so..painful?

Fenster

With registrations, validations and all that, assuming it even loads! I've had it hang utterly six times on "finding new update", despite all the relevant components installed into IE and permitted by my firewall.

I can understand that Microsoft want to now crack down on piracy, but the loops they force users to seemingly jump through (and this is a legitimate OEM version installed on its original machine) only hurts themselves, as more unpatched machines means more zombies. You have to compare this to software updates in other OS':

Apple OSX: Click the "Software Update" button, drink a coffee.
Fedora Linux: "yum -y upgrade" as root, drink a few coffees.
Gentoo Linux: "emerge -Ud world", leave it overnight.

And so on.

/rant

irishgeo

One word active x and they way IE intergrates into the operating system.Thats 90% of all the updates.

Dempsey

Tis abit fiddly alright but I dont think I encountered the problems your getting and im on 56K! They could simplify it though

Capt'n Midnight

Fenster you forgot apt-get , but yeah it's a one liner in most other OS's

Allowing SUS to run on a Workstation or an NT server would have been a help.

At present to update multiple machines you HAVE TO connect your server to the internet or BUY a third party app or DEVELOP a patching scheme yourself and that's a real pain or download an untrusted Patch kit that someone else did.

Spent an hour today rebooting servers one at a time, mostly for stuff like IE and media player .NET and other uninstallable ##### that has no business whatsoever being on a server. And servers should have no reason to connect to the internet unless they are webservers in a DMZ.

It's like living in Dublins urban sprawl, there are no local shops because everyone has a car. Everyone needs a car because there are no amenities in walking distance. You have to keep windows connected to the internet to patch it, to protect it from the internet /RANT.

Fenster

Aye, Apt as well. I only used it in Fedora though, where it was pretty hit and miss-I've a short rant up on the Linux board. I never used Ubuntu much, or Debian at all, so I can't really comment on it for those distros, although I imagine its along the lines of "apt-get -y upgrade"

rsynnott

It's actually amazingly good, when you consider what it was like pre win2k... But compared to any other modern operating system, yeah, not so good. And is still makes you ****ing reboot...

Capt'n Midnight

rsynnott wrote:

And is still makes you ****ing reboot...

If all goes well you only have to reboot just once :rolleyes:

Fenster

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

If all goes well you only have to reboot just once :rolleyes:

I recall having to reboot four times in a row once.

rsynnott

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

If all goes well you only have to reboot just once :rolleyes:

Well, that's not good enough, I'm afraid. The only reason you should be required to reboot is if changes are made to the kernel (not to kernel modules, to the kernel itself).

And it badgers you to reboot every few minutes if you tell it not to.

Capt'n Midnight

rsynnott wrote:

The only reason you should be required to reboot is if changes are made to the kernel (not to kernel modules, to the kernel itself)..

That just proves that Internet Explorer and Outlook Express and Fonts and DirectX and .NET just about everything except some sections of Office are part of the Kernel :rolleyes:

Microsoft have advertised five 9's reliability 99.999% uptime in the past.
That translates into 315.36 seconds of downtime a year. Some servers take this long to reboot, from the time the shared services have stopped to the time they are usable again. At present it takes about an hour to reboot our servers after patching, part of this is because you don't want more than one machine down at a time, part is because some services are dependent on up to three servers running together. So just to keep patches up to date drops availability to 99.9%

Yes I know the advertised 99.999% is on got having a cluster BUT Netware and VMS used to do this 15 years ago (and the Dutch police still have 0 downtime on their VMS cluster).

aidan_walsh

What I really don't like about it is that it doesn't give you the option of going more than one node down an update tree. For example, If you install .NET 1.1 and run Win Update, the only update you will see is SP1 for .NET 1.1. Download and install, and run Win Update again, and you'll see that there is a further patch for the Service Pack. Why not give the option of downloading the entire update tree at the time, and install them sequentially?

Hope its fixed by Longhorn (circa the year 3000).