MS Conspiracy

The first reports that I saw of anything were from September 06, when people complained of a bug that MS apparently admitted to having in MS Update. This was when a run of Microsoft Update took 5 minutes to check for updates. Since then I have observed it take over an hour.

The really terrible thing is that, even while Automatic Updates runs in the background, it runs at a normal priority. That means that for the 45 minutes or so that it checks for updates /every day/ (Windows won't let you set the update check interval longer than 22 or so hours) it will render any machine slower than a 2ghz P4 (or so) almost unuseable.

The suggestions to revert to Windows Update are right, but then you totally lose the ability to get Office updates at all, as the Office update site just gives you a link to Microsoft Update.

In addition, I have observed that Automatic Updates will try to run at the same time as a manual update, which causes the manual update to quit halfway through, since Automatic is already installing the same update, and then causes Automatic Update to stop with a vague error some time later. At this point is is safe to run manual update again to get the updates. That process has taken me upwards of 90 minutes on a 2.4 GHz P4 w/ 1GB of ram.

My theory is that MS intentionally did this (thus the slow but dramatic increase in time required to scan for updates... if they just jumped from 30 seconds to 45 minutes a lot more people would have noticed) to get people to upgrade to Vista. In case anyone is wondering, it takes Vista about 10 seconds to do the same thing.

That said, I would also like to suggest that all of Windows ME was a ruse to get people to be more willing to switch to XP when it came out. Theres just no way so many problems could crop up in an OS that was essentially just Windows 98 + 3 features.

- Nexox