Broken Windows
I run a dual boot machine, using both Linux and Windows operating systems. I rarely boot Windows but only use it once a semester or so to try out some application or to compile Gebabbel for my Windows users.
These days I wanted to check out some editors and tools for the Z1. So I was finally back to the infamous world of Windows shareware, freeware and demo software. I immediately felt uncomfortable.
When booting Vista after some time, you will be bothered by almost any bit in your machine that begs for updating it – Vista itself, Adobe Reader, Java, you name it. The best thing is that Vista will deny to shut down or reboot before the updates aren’t installed or “configured” properly. That’s pretty annoying if you need to reboot your machine during some driver installation.
Driver installation? True. I use some USB MIDI devices which are class compliant and therefore run without any special driver on Linux and Mac OS X. Vista searched the Web for a driver but failed miserably. So I had to visit the homepage of the manufacturer and to manually download and install a driver¹. After some further fiddling I noticed that something went wrong and the data received from the synth was garbage. Doh!
It’s great we have the internet, and it’s great to get free updates for your operating system. As a long time Linux user, I’m used to it. But I decide when to do updates. Mac OS X notifies me if updates are available and lets me decide whether to install it now or later. Windows notifies me that the machine needs a reboot – the only option I had was to delay it for a couple of hours.
None of the tools I tried out fulfilled my needs, so I’m now “back home” on my Linux box. There’s nothing wrong with Windows, but for me it’s just not the operating system of choice.
¹ Yeah, that’s how we did it in the last century, in times of Web 1.0
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Update:
Today a colleague of mine tested our software in a virtual machine running Vista. While copying an ISO image (remaining time: 13 minutes and 10 seconds) Vista insisted in a reboot in 4 minutes and 19 seconds. The option to postpone the reboot was disabled. The only way to avoid the reboot was to kill windows update via the task manager:
Vista Update
