With-in a week of buying my second laptop I had turned off Windows automatic updates. Being deeply suspicious of Microsoft I opted to choose when and what I would update my operating system with. So for the past 4 years this laptop has worked almost seamlessly, this included buggering around with it and installing a dual boot so that it could run either XP or Vista. Even after doing this the laptop remained remarkably stable in either operating system and gave me years of pain free use.
Then I did a bit of consulting work for a small geothermal development company which required me to have a copy of MS Project loaded. Their resident IT guru chided me for turning Windows Automatic updates off, citing that I needed many of the numerous error fix patches so he could load MS Project. So I reactivated the update function and spent many happy hours catching up on all those important updates I had missed out on. So now I can safely say that the days of trouble free computing are over. My Laptop now repeatedly crashes and has become increasingly slower and slower with every log-in. Finally culminating, the other night in becoming completely unusable. The system was tied up running numerous scvhost.exe processes. A quick search reveals that I am not alone in having this problem and that it was caused by “A problem with Windows automatic update” Subsequent updates to fix the problem didn´t work. I imagine that MS is doing all it can now to remedy the situation and are probably offering suggestions like “Why not upgrade to Windows 7, it works fine.”
I have a friend that hates Apple and all its products (although he has never owned one) he thinks Windows rocks. I think he is a wanker.
I might try loading Ubuntu.
