I just realized that while I had installed Windows 7 on my desktop when it first came out, I haven’t run it since I returned from my US trip in mid-November.  Wide awake and not feeling like doing anything serious, I figured it was time I got back into it.   Now it looks as if I could be up all night as a result.

First, when Win7 came up, I was informed that my copy was “not genuine.”  This cheesed me off because I had spent the money for the upgrade, purchased from a dealer I trusted, and had run it many times (though not recently).  I had to re-enter the license key – interrupted multiple times by pop-ups telling me that my software’s not genuine and do I want to go online to fix it, even though that’s what I was in the process of doing.

Okay, done.  Now Win7 goes and downloads and installs 3 months worth of updates.  It does that.  I reboot the computer.  Win7 starts fine this time.  And as soon as it has finished booting, I’m informed that there are three IMPORTANT updates available.  Fuck me sideways.

Pretty much every other program I’m running in this configuration (not that many, actually) wants to download and install updates, too.  From iTunes to my mouse driver, nothing is stable, nothing is fixed in time, nothing works properly ever.  (Please, no comments about getting a Mac.  I have a Mac.  I also like Windows.)

The real puzzler is Firefox.  It goes to download an update and downloads 3.5.4 and not 3.6.  As soon as it downloads 3.5.4 and I tell it to check for an update again, it starts download 3.5.7!  WTF?   So I do a manual download of 3.6 and go to install it.  My Win7 user account is set up with full admin privileges, but each time I try to run the 3.6 install, it fails.  Each time it asks me if I want to run as the current user or as Admin.  Selecting either one fails – I can’t recall if I set an admin password, I try all the usual suspects, they all fail.

Windows remains just one layer of frustration after another.  There are so many lines of code, so much heritage stuff, so many band-aids, that Microsoft is incapable of delivering a quality operating system unless some day they abandon all of their old code and start fresh.  Which is probably a billion dollar project.  But the geniuses there see Mac, Linux, Android, all eating away at their base but they don’t worry because their corporate foothold for both Windows and Office remains secure.  It’s just too big a task for a company with 50,000 seats to migrate everyone from Windows to something else – but it has also become too big a task for many companies to migrate off WinXP to something else – to get their infrastructure dept trained, to get their users trained, to get their apps tested, to do the actual installs.  It’s Catch-22 times a zillion.

Okay, 100 meg just downloaded to update iTunes.  275 meg, ffs, downloaded to update the Creative software I’ve got.

Or I could just give up on all this and go back to XP.

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