Just when you thought it was safe to update your computer

There’s nothing quite so dispiriting as coming into work in the morning and finding that the huge service pack you applied the night before has reduced your PC to a catatonic state.

Of course you never bothered to read all the pre-deployment bumf about what pitfalls you might encounter or whether you had enough disk space (at least 15Gb in Vista SP1’s case) or whether your disk drive was free of errors.

So, out of laziness or boredom or both you’ve now spent three days getting back to a semblance of the system you had prior to committing your blind faith in Microsoft service packs.
Hmm, haven’t I been here before – Well yes, frequently.

Cynics and people who manage to use computers and programs as a tool for them, as opposed to the other way round, always wait until at least version 3 has been released. That way they are far less likely to get shafted by the corporation’s astonishing lack of testing prior to imposition on an unsuspecting public.

Those veterans of the microcomputer revolution will probably vaguely recall the very first version of Windows. It was the most amusement I’d ever had with a kludge GUI. As a simulator for a frozen system and taking a minimum of 15 minutes to actually load it was a winner. Once loaded, any attempt to actually do something resulted in the system crashing. No wonder computer users always prefer the devil they knew, in this case good old DOS.

My frequent visits, on behalf of the large corporation I worked for, to the old Microsoft headquarters at Bellevue in the early eighties to sort out the many problems with various purchased applications and programming languages illustrated the wide gap between what was sold and what was delivered. On one occasion, after finding the programmer responsible for one particularly obscure package, I was told “oh that man, it’s a pile of shit” and that, needless to say was the end of the matter as far as he was concerned.

But, I digress. During the three days system rebuild I was lucky that most of my data was saved on a network drive. I still had to complete all the finishing touches like reinstalling all my applications and rebuilding my favourites list and fonts – yes even IT experts slip up sometimes.
Perhaps as IT professionals we think it will never happen to us – well I’ve got news for you, it does.