That Expensive Microsoft Experience
Yesterday I finished reinstalling Vista Business on my MacBook Pro. I say finished, because the reinstallation required two days. I needed to reinstall Vista after I had updated Mac OS X to Snow Leopard (10.6), at which time I had wiped out my old Vista partition, which at 25 GB was too small.
I used Boot Camp Assistant to create a 32-GB partition and reboot my MacBook Pro from the Vista installation DVD. I installed Vista Business from the DVD and then began applying software updates. I should have counted these, but I estimate there were six separate operating system updates that I estimate required six hours to apply. The first update applied 93 individual patches to my system, and I let this run while I slept. If I remember correctly, it reported that it took 90 minutes to complete the update. Later updates updated Vista to SP1 (Service Pack 1) and SP2 (Service Pack 2). (I discovered that I couldn’t get the SP2 and later updates until I remembered to activate Vista.) One of the updates installed Internet Explorer 8; that one took a long time because I didn’t realize that it had displayed a dialog window for accepting the EULA. The problem was that the dialog was hidden under the main update window, where I couldn’t see it.
My question at this point is, why can’t Microsoft combine all these updates into a single update? Why do I have to install SP1 before I can install SP2? Why can’t SP2 contain all the changes already in SP1?
After installing Vista, I installed Office 2007 Professional, after which at least two more updates were required to bring it up to date, taking another two hours.
I want to contrast that experience to what happened last fall when I wiped clean my old PowerBook G4 and performed a fresh install of Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). My install disk installed OS X 10.5 (which you would think would be called version 10.5.0, but Apple doesn’t begin adding the third numeric field until the first revision is released). When I ran software update, there was a single (massive) update that rolled all changes from 10.5 to 10.5.7 into a single update.
So the Microsoft Experience was six hours of time spent reinstalling Vista, and the Apple Experience was two hours of time spent reinstalling OS X 10.5. If I were doing this for a living, I would bill $75 per hour for my time — $450 for reinstalling Vista, $150 for reinstalling Leopard. The Microsoft Experience cost me an extra four hours of my time or $300 equivalent. This is the primary reason I prefer OS X over Vista — it is less expensive to install and maintain.
Note: What I really wanted to do was install Windows 7, but Apple has been slow in releasing the drivers necessary for full support. Having originally promised the new drivers by the end of 2009, Apple now provides a much more vague estimate of when the drivers will be available.
January 10 2010 09:25 am | Computing
Tom on 24 Jan 2010 at 1:33 pm #
A third operating system perspective – I built a new machine over the Thanksgiving holiday & installed Kubuntu Linux. I’d say the install took about 10 minutes from the CD, and once installed, web updates took perhaps another 5 minutes. I installed VMware player and loaded a WinXPpro image created in VMWare for Windows, updated VMtools.
My goal for this machine was to do most work in Linux, with the option of running Excel and a few other apps in Windows, and thus far it has worked out well.