Bring on the pain.... Part 1

So this morning I decided to download and install SP1 for Vi$ta on my work laptop. Do I have nothing better to do today? No. But Every time some new whizzbang article comes out about Vista, Mr. CEO and company keep hinting that "they should upgrade to Vista one of these days." No, you shouldn't. Don't touch anything. Notes, Office, and your web browser will not benefit from the fluffy resource-hog of an operating system.

So here starts my journey through the presumed hell that is the installation. Lets start with forgetting the fact that it took about 60 days to really get my machine back to the way it was supposed to be running with all of my apps and tools under XP when I initially installed this pig. I've had it for a year now and have been doing ok after the initial beatdown. Apps that run well include Notes 8, putty, HP Data Protector, Firefox (2.x and Beta 3), Office Pro 2003 and 2007, iTunes, McAfee, Xming, Sun Identity Manager, Cisco VPN client 5.0.00.0340, RealVNC, Blackberry Desktop Manager. These are my main items for work. The home beast also runs Vista, but is strictly used for blowing shit up after a hard days work. It's a gaming rig and nothing more.

So the SP1 upgrade has been going for about 20 minutes now... according to the window, "The installation might take an hour or more". Interesting. It should read:

"We are changing so much shit on your PC that it's going be be awhile before you can even think about be productive today. Fixing all of the crap in our bloated OS really takes a long time!"

Let's have a look at my system resources during this "patch" process...



Ok... so theres really nothing wrong with using more than 80% of the cpu and 2GB of memory to perform an update., right? Oh wait... I almost forgot the 847 MB of swap being used. WTF?

I know I know... I'm blogging while this is happening. That must be it.

Here's hoping I have a running machine when this is all over.