Vista sp1 and XP sp3 - I got there and all is well....
The management, reliability and ease of use of updates for XP and Vista has gone downhill recently (yeah yeah, "how low can they go?" I hear you say).
I have bashed my way through an Vista sp1 update and an XP sp3 update and it is only through determination and domain expertise that I succeeded. How the average punter gets it done I just don't know.
Key solutions (apart from having the persistence of a starved dog) for me were:
- On the XP machine, droping Zone Alarm and McAfee in favour of combined Fortinet AntiVirus/Firewall etc was key.
- On the Vista box it was disabling many resource hungry features like search indexing and fancy desktop features that gave me half decent performance.
I seriously considered an alternative, but who wants a friggin' Mac? If M$ don't get better in the next 12-24 months I'll be forced to go Mac and put up with the vomiting in repulsion, albeit over a more stable but expensive and thoroughly unattractive machine/OS. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place...