evan meagher

Windows Update Upset

December 22, 2007 at 2:08 pm

Being back home for the holidays, I took it upon myself to update my parents’ Windows box. I leave Windows Update off so they don’t get inundated with bullshit update popups and opt instead toward periodic manual updates.

After using Ubuntu for three months, the Windows XP update system comes off as an absolute chore. It requires that you use Internet Explorer as opposed to Ubuntu’s native update manager. The update packages take much longer to download and install than those of Ubuntu (granted, they’re usually much larger). The overall experience is frustrating and not nearly as streamlined as it could be.

The icing on the cake was the driver that Windows Update suggested for the Radeon 9200 graphics card in my parents’ computer. I queued up all the suggested updates and went back to help set up the Christmas tree. After rebooting the computer, Windows booted in 800x600 with pixelly, distorted 8-bit color. In a nutshell, everything looked like shit, thanks to the POS driver that Windows Update suggested.

The problem wasn’t hard to fix. I got ATI’s latest driver from their website, installed, and rebooted to find everything back to the usable norm. What bothers me is that if a relatively computer-illiterate person encountered this problem after being told by Microsoft that their system was dandy and up-to-date, they would have been dead in the water.

Not everyone would know to go fetch a legit driver from their graphics card manufacturer’s website, let alone who their manufacturer is or even that the problem is with the graphics driver. Bottom line, one should design systems to be usable by those who are least proficient with them.

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