by Alec Muffett
I love Windows.
I love the way you can boot it to do something small but urgent, having not booted for several weeks, and it will chug, chunder, whiz and chime, repeatedly demanding to be rebooted whilst achieving precisely nothing for you.
So many flashing lights! So many resonant bongs!
It’s like a flower that you can be forced to contemplate whilst the world around you explodes.
Question is, if you smoke those resonant bongs while waiting for Windows to do something … is that a good use of your time? 🙂
I love windows too.
They let light in… and cool fresh air as well.
Oh… on a computer, they also let viruses in.
Gilles.
Of course, the problem you had was trying to use Windows AND “do something small but urgent” at the same time. You can never use Windows for something urgent as there’s always something to get in the way.
Daily there’s the anti-virus update… which can take 5 minutes or so, during which the machine is useless. Then, there’s Windows/Microsoft Update which will check with Microsoft and the product registry (churn-churn) at boot time. Oh, and of course, a lot off applications like to phone home to check that they don’t need to update as well.
Then there are a whole host of hidden programs which start up at login-time installed silently by applications, all of which need to churn the disk. Oh, and if you have an ATI graphics card the latest drivers will pull in the whole .Net virtual machine and run a number of programs, refresh the desktop a few times and set a program listening on the network.
The upshot o all this is that a Windows box which has been running for a few years will take 3-5 times as long to boot up and log in as a freshly installed one, just ‘cos of the moss growing inside.
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