Mailbag: Microsoft Patch Problems, More
Last week, Doug asked readers
what
they thought of Microsoft's patching strategy. Rodney is less than satisfied:
Until now, I was wondering if I was the only person with updates (three)
riding my system tray for the past two weeks, hoping I shut my system down
so they can play at installing. I'm running Vista Home Premium and this is
the second time that this has happened. Updates arrive one evening and fail
at installing for weeks at a time. When one batch installs, another batch
appears to repeat the process.
With WinXP, updates installed in the background and were less obvious.
What's going on with Vista?
-Rodney
And speaking of Vista, Nick has a bone to pick:
I have Vista Ultimate pre-loaded on a Dell Inspiron 9400. Mostly, it
is very impressive. Getting my Dell bluetooth keyboard and mouse to work with
the internal bluetooth card instead of the dongle was challenging. Sonic DLA
didn't work for the first month or so until a driver patch came out. I am
still waiting for F-Prot to issue a Vista-compatible version. So far, it's
as least as good as XP was in its first six months. UAC is a non-issue. The
UI changes take some getting used to, but if you ran IE7 on XP they aren't
so jarring. There is one bad thing. One being minor, 10 being intolerable,
this is 1.76038875096-E99.
I am talking about VERY slow file cut/copy/paste between networked machines.
Do a Google search for "Vista slow file copy" and you will see what
I mean. In a non-domain environment, cut/copy/paste operations between untrusted
machines using pass-through authentication take FOREVER (i.e., 100MB of files
on gigabit backbone taking 20-plus minutes to complete). That we are four
months past release and this still isn't fixed doesn't bode well. We have
absolutely no intention of creating a mixed XP-SBS2003-Vista environment until
it does get fixed. The silence from MS on this problem has been deafening.
-Nick
Got something to add? Let us have it! Comment below or send an e-mail to [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on June 18, 2007