Boredworkers.com

So I finally formatted my PC. Miraculously, nothing terribly untoward happened. I’m still alive, there was no Sunday news headlines of death by PC reformat, there were no ugly explosions. In fact, it was a rather dull night. Dull enough that I fell asleep after making the initial configurations and passed the point where the automated installation kicked in.

I fell asleep around midnight, having started the process at 11.00pm and when I woke up this morning at 7.30am, everything was installed and peachy. Then came the long dreary task of updating the Operating System. See, the thing is, I was installing an OEM version of Windows XP Professional Edition with Service Pack 1a. That means that it is way out-of-date, with a surprisingly long list of security loopholes.

My first visit to Microsoft Update’s website yielded 4 new components that needed to be installed, on top of the ActiveX agent that was required by the Microsoft Update site to detect which components were needed. These are the new ‘installer’ and ‘authentication’ components that were introduced by Microsoft in its efforts against piracy.

A quick reboot and a second visit yielded an additional 48 components! Talk about a whole lot of patches and security flaws. These totalled some 46MB of downloads. Needless to say, I left the automated patch to work on its own and watched some cartoons on the tele. The process which started at 8.00am took a whole hour to complete.

After doing some final checks, I restarted the PC knowing that I had at least one more patch to make. It was the patch that I dreaded the most; the upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 2. So it wasn’t really surprise when a message popped up on the desktop after the reboot informing me that I needed to upgrade to SP2. What i didn’t know was that XP Service Pack 1 was transitioning to non-supported status come 10th October 2006. Now we know.

According to the update page, the SP2 package was approximately 76MB in size and would take 33 minutes to download. That’s a lie! When the download process started up, it weighed in at a whopping 109MB and took approximately 2 hours by my clock. 2 cartoons and an episode of Fear Factor later, I returned to my room to find that it was finally ready to install.

As usual, the installer made a backup in case anything bad happens. That in itself chewed up another 15 minutes on my aging Celeron 1.1GHz system, followed by another 15 minutes to check my system to make sure it was ready to install. When it was finally happy with everything, it started a lengthy upgrade process that took over an hour!

All in, the entire upgrading and updating business took up an entire morning spent waiting and watching television, three cartoons, a full length animated feature, and an episode of Fear Factor all in. A total of 61 patches made taking up approximately five hours. The result was a primary partition filled near to its 4.8GB capacity with crap! More on how to clean up after a Service Pack update later.

Advice:
Do not attempt to update your Windows Operating System unless you have a lot of time on your hands. Especially if you’re updating the Service Pack. It takes a bloody long time!

I rebooted the PC and waited for the Windows desktop to show up. I’m glad to say that I haven’t been tattooed with one of those Windows anti-piracy popup and warning thingies. That means it’s safe to assume that my copy of Windows XP Pro is legal. How about you? Is your’s legal?