The nightmare of upgrading Windows Vista

For years until last December, I avoided installing any version of Windows on my personal computers; I had a Mac, which I used for things like word processing, and a Linux-based PC which I used for net surfing and programming. Then, my parents bought me a laptop last Christmas, a Dell Inspiron 6400 which came with Windows Vista pre-installed. I always found this Vista rather flaky in its operation; it took ages to start up – even when it had appeared to start up, it really hadn’t, still being engaged in loading all those programs you see in the icon bar at the bottom right, and that pointless applet panel on the right side of the screen; when I needed to start the Control Panel, it would take ages, and that’s only when it would start at all; on about two-thirds of occasions, it would go unresponsive, and take the bottom panel and start menu down with it. I thought that installing Service Pack 1 would cure all this, and various people on the internet say it’s improved the reliability of their systems, so I tried doing it the normal way, through Windows Update.

Well, last Saturday, I installed a whole load of updates, but probably because it somehow did not finish configuring properly, it kept offering me one particular update, namely “Cumulative Security Update for ActiveX Killbits for Windows Vista (KB950760)”, and failing to install it, displaying the error code 800B0100 with no explanation. The Windows help had no explanation for this code either, and although I could find one on the internet, all the solutions failed. It seemed that the only solution was to re-install Vista, which would supposedly mean wiping my Windows partition and starting again. Or so everyone told me.

So, last night I got down to backing up all my data, installing the SSH server on my big Linux box so I could transfer everything (mostly installers for programs, but also a few pictures and documents – actually not much actual data which didn’t also exist elsewhere) over the network to that machine. At 11pm, I was finally ready to re-install Vista – after trying the System Restore program, which works by finding “restore points” set when you installed programs or updates beforehand, but in this case there were only four such points remaining, all from failed update attempts yesterday, and searching for the Dell PC Restore software which was supposedly bundled with my machine, but which I couldn’t find. (Perhaps I deleted it while installing Linux on it, but I don’t remember this; I thought I’d left this just in case.)

Well, as it turns out, the Dell manual (which is dated April 2007 and only mentions Windows XP, not Vista) was wrong: if you tell the Windows Vista installer where to put your new installation and do not actually tell it to format your hard drive or partition, it won’t. It will simply copy all your old files to a directory called “Windows.old”, leaving all your personal data intact. This still leaves the lengthy task of doing all the updates which appeared since Vista appeared in 2006, installing SP1 itself which really does take an hour or more and reboots the system twice, and reinstalling your anti-virus (if you use it) and all your old applications, but it’s not the same as wiping your hard drive.

So, this is a public service announcement to anyone whose Vista upgrade is stuck: just re-install. It’s not as painful as it sounds.

Still, it makes me appreciate the benefits of Linux install and upgrade programs, particularly the APT software on Ubuntu, which (mostly) just works. It doesn’t restart your computer several times during an upgrade, it doesn’t tell you to close all your applications while it upgrades, it tells you what it’s doing rather than just displaying a green bar … really, all this has been around for years, so I don’t see why Microsoft can’t learn from it. Even Apple’s update system vastly excels over MS’s in this regard. I have long wished Microsoft would do what Apple did, and base their OS on Unix (and they can do this without licensing it, as FreeBSD is just that – free, even for commercial derivatives). As it stands, the Windows Vista disk management software does not even recognise non-Windows partition types, and over-wrote my boot management program, as if to reflect Microsoft’s annoyance that I’m not only using their software. Still, making life cheaper for software developers and other customers is not really on Microsoft’s agenda.

I also find it a bit odd that some people think we should think well of Bill Gates on account of recently having quit Microsoft and starting work at his AIDS charity. Really, Gates is as rich as he is not because his most lucrative software is good, but because of the miscalculations of the competition (Digital Research, WordPerfect, Lotus) back in the 1980s and 1990s. Most people have a little money, earned with solid hard work, and cannot afford to throw it around. His upcoming retirement, doubtless including a lot of travelling round the world and kissing a lot of babies, hardly compensates for his and his company’s decade or more of public disservice.