97 updates?? You gotta be kidding.

[Shalom]

I didn't think XP would even install on a drive that size (given that it's an SSD, I assume that 15G is the size of the entire drive, not a partition)...I had always heard that allowing 30GB just for XP install+swapfile+"you'd damn well better leave 20-30% free space" was the minimum...

Well that's what WinFLP is for. I once got a working install on a 2 gig Compact Flash card, just to see if I could.

[EricKei]

I had to tell them we couldn't update it for them cos the solid state hard drive was 16G and the update was 15G.

I didn't think XP would even install on a drive that size (given that it's an SSD, I assume that 15G is the size of the entire drive, not a partition)...I had always heard that allowing 30GB just for XP install+swapfile+"you'd damn well better leave 20-30% free space" was the minimum...

[Jetfire]

As I posted in another thread, I just did a reinstall of my desktop over the weekend. My Install DVD had Vista 64-bit, with SP1 already. After the install was done, I told it to do updates, and it had 121 updates to apply. Thankfully after that there were only 3-4 other miscellaneous updates I had to apply beyond that, mainly for additional stuff I activated.

[TheSHAD0W]

Uhm. FYI, the service packs are "roll-ups" which encompass all the interim updates that come before them. (XP SP3 might be an exception.) So you don't have to do all those updates. Probably too late, but...

[Chromatix]

Here's a big tip that I just remembered. A lot of the time spent during updates is all about making a Restore Point. So if you turn off Restore Points it should go a bit quicker - it also saves disk space.

Defragging might also help. Do that after turning off Restore Points, so there's less data to shuffle.

[mattm04]

Edit: It's worse than I thought. One of those 52 updates was SP3. This means that it needed 51 updates just to bring it up to the point where I can even install SP3...

Once I had a XP machine tell me it had 20 something updates. That was just to get to a windows update update. After that it had 40 ish more updates, including SP3.

[Shalom]

Now they've broken it altogether.

So now I've checked the two registers on the counter here, which are the pharmacy register and the front store's express register.

Pharmacy register: 52 updates ready to install.

Edit: It's worse than I thought. One of those 52 updates was SP3. This means that it needed 51 updates just to bring it up to the point where I can even install SP3...

Front store register: Still running XPSP2; therefore windows update doesn't even work. Currently downloading SP3 manually. G_d knows how many it's going to need after that.

Edit again: The front store register finished downloading SP3. I go to install it, it takes forever unzipping everything, and then gives me "You do not have permission to update windows. Contact your systems administrator."

Oh well. I guess that one's on its own then. I'm going home.

Of course, these are the last updates these computers are likely to get, because whoever administers our SonicWall has recently dropped download.windowsupdate.com in the blocklist as a Freeware/Software Download site. (Gee, ya think?? ) Now whenever we try to get new updates, it fails with an Error 0x80190193 because it can't reach the server. I'm going to have to have Words with our firewall administrator, if I can even find out who he is.

[roxtar]

had the system drive on my htpc crash a couple of weeks ago. took forever to go from xp -> sp2 -> sp3 ->fully patched sp3.

I had backups of most of my "stuff" but not the full disk image, so I had to build back the OS from a bare install (didn't have the external drive space for everything).

I think my update record was when I went from ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid ibex) to ubuntu 10.04 (lucid lynx). since intrepid wasn't an LTS distro, I had to go through jaunty and karmic before I could install lucid.

[DGoddessChardonnay]

Ditto. I have a desktop at home that runs xp and if it ever crashes I do NOT want to re install. It'd take a week.

Sounds like my old laptop, which I've been working on for the past week. Trying to re-install 108 plus updates on Vista Basic is a royal PITA. I have to break them up into several batches of 10 or less (depending on the file size) just to get them all downloaded in order.

Of course once I get past that part, updating the software (Adobe products, antivirus, et al) is a cakewalk compared to the sheer tedious Hell that is Windows Update.

[Krysalis]

Sounds like my dad's computer, which I was running maintenance on last night, also making sure he had Windows 7 updated with the latest patches, especially against the recent Flame malware.

He has never, ever, once run the updater, in the year he's had the laptop.

So, we finally get him updated to SP1 last night, then called it a night.

Next will be renewing his antivirus subscription...

[telecom_goddess]

I think my current record is 150 updates. Of course, that was from an XP SP2 installation, fresh, and installing absolutely every possible update. There's a reason I hate setting up a new machine on XP.

Ditto. I have a desktop at home that runs xp and if it ever crashes I do NOT want to re install. It'd take a week.

[dalesys]

Well, as CCR sang in '68: Ninety-Nine And A Half (Won't Do)

[Zoom]

I never bothered getting SP3. SP2 worked fine.

Of course, I only use my XP comps for offline coding projects now. But hey, they still work!

[Shalom]

Well, I think I figured out why this happened.

My server is the only one of the three pharmacy computers that has always-on internet access. [1] THe other two, if you want to get on the net for some reason, you run up against the firewall (a so-called "network security appliance"), which you then have to log into in order to go online. Now all the pharmacy employees know the login and password for this, but if you don't do this logon, the machine can't connect to anything outside the LAN. This means that windowsupdate.micro$oft.com is blocked most of the time, so even though automatic updating is turned on, nothing will actually happen unless you first logon and then update.

This being the case, I decided to check my boss's workstation at the other end of the counter. Hit IE, logged into the firewall, and went to microsoft update. Sure enough . . .

"Downloading update 1 of 98 . . ."

At least I'd already installed SP3 on that one, sometime last year.

[1] Although since the Asifa, they've turned filtering on, so there's no longer unlimited access. E-commerce, reference, etc. sites are mostly allowed, but social, arts/entertainment, multimedia etc. sites are now blocked. On the one hand, I think this is a good idea, both in terms of getting work done, and protecting innocent eyes from seeing things they really shouldn't see (remember this is an exclusively Hasidic neighborhood, literally a ghetto in the original non-pejorative sense of the word, where modest (i.e. nonrevealing) dress is the norm. No man who lives there has ever seen so much as a woman's elbow, unless it's their wife's or under-3-year-old daughter's. Anyone wants to argue about this, take it to Fratching, I don't wanna hear it.) On the other hand, I've been on the 'net since before there was pr0n on it 1993, and I'd gotten used to being able to hit youtube, drudgereport, various webcomix, certain blogs, etc when I wanted a break. Sure I can get around this by tethering my laptop to my cellphone and logging on through vzn, but it's really too slow for video. Ah well, CS.com is as yet not blocked, so the essentials are still available. )

[Kogarashi]

PepperElf, after dealing with my college roommate's HP Pavilion (about half the size of my own home-built computer), I refuse to work in anything less than a regular-sized case. We couldn't do diddly with the hardware in her computer, even though both of us knew how to do hardware upgrades and the like. There just wasn't the room to put anything, plus the motherboard had been hardwired to only accept the harddrive that came with the thing, so we couldn't even change up that. The only saving grace was that she'd gotten it for free because the house it had been in had been hit by lightning and apparently fried the computer (turned out it had only taken out the modem, which had subsequently shut down the rest of the computer until removed).

And oh dear, I remember the day I had to completely reinstall XP on my last build sometime after SP3 had come out. An entire day spent just on running all the updates and everything so XP could see the entire drive and not just the small portion that pre-SP1 is capable of seeing, and after that I still had to reinstall all my programs.