Installing Windows 7 sucks

I have been running Linux Mint on my laptop for the whole summer. It is fast and quick to install and update once installed, you can do the whole process in an hour or so. In addition to this the software centre allows you to find the programs you want quickly. Best of it is free and it is actually rather nice to use and you never get the feeling that someone is messing about with your computer in the back ground.

Unfortunately for me like many other people I have to use Microsoft Windows for my work. This is not something I want to do but have to do because everyone else uses it. This requires me to have a Windows 7 machine at home I can use to, to supplement my now ageing Mac and the other IBM PC compatible machines running Linux Mint.

So yesterday I started the process of reinstalling Windows 7, a process that I still doing now some 6 hours later. This includes two fresh installs after the first one refused to update at all. Now the initial installs themselves are fine it what happens after that is the problem. It is the updating process itself with it's hundred  and eight patches to the operating system. 

Currently the machine is downloading 444.3 megabytes of  updates. In the last hour it has download eight percent of the those updates, that is just over 36.5 megabytes. This equates to a download speed of  1.3 kilobits per second on an internet connection in excess of 5,000 kilobits per second. If the machine is true to form then sometime in the next 30 minutes the whole process will fail completely. That is what happened the first time.

The question I would like to put to Microsoft is "If the Linux people can do do the whole process so quickly, what stops them doing the same?" without all the excuses. While I have been waiting I have been doing some research and I'm not the only one with this problem and it goes back years to Windows Vista. All I have found are so called Microsoft engineers blaming peoples internet connection speeds and never accepting responsibility for the problem being at there end. 

Well I find this unacceptable especially given the security record of Microsoft products. The last thing you want is a machine with lots of security holes sitting on the internet unprotected from those threats even as a home user, let alone a business user. Updating should be fast efficient and immediate and not slow. 

With Windows 8 being just as bad for updating as Windows Vista and Windows 7 the solution to this  problem is going to go away until the release of Windows 9. That is if anyone buys Windows again after the mess they made of Windows 8 which most of my colleagues working in IT technical support claim they won't consider using in a business environment. 

It is no wonder given the problems with recent release of Microsoft Windows so many people at home and in business are still using their Windows XP machines and not planning to swap to a new version of the operating system. If Microsoft are not careful the slow match to Linux might become the big rush.