Well Done Microsoft?
I’ve been a bit busy of late, still am but I thought I’d take a bit of time out to get Windows Update sorted today. I knew SP2 was on-site waiting to be downed and installed but I just hadn’t got around to it. I’d also heard one or two bad things about it so I was in no particular rush to put myself through it.
Anyway it so happens that I visit The Watchmaker Project on a regular basis, as you may have spotted in earlier posts, and a few days ago I was reading Matthew’s account of how his SP2 update had all gone horribly wrong, and let’s face it, you’d think of all people he’d know what he was doing. His account didn’t instil a lot of confidence in me to take the plunge and try it myself. So a couple of days later I was reading some of the comments he’d had to his post and Matthew from differentsky had left a link to a site that explains a process called Slip-streaming. No I haven’t heard of it before either. I won’t go into great detail. I’ll give you the link in a minute.
What Slip-streaming does is this: if you have an original Windows XP disc ( not one of those you tend to get these days with some PCs which are branded by the PC manufacturer, like Advent, Dell, Tiny or whatever which tend to already have certain updates included in them) you can upload the disc contents to your hard-drive. Then you need to download all 270MBs of the developers’ version of SP2 to your hard-drive (not really for dial-ups this one) and go into MS-DOS and enter a DOS command which will integrate (slipstream) the SP2 update into your XP disc files. Then with ISOBuster and Nero (or similar) you can create a new XP Boot Disc which is already at the SP2 level. Excellent if you have future problems and need to re-install XP cuz now it will already be SP2 and you won’t have to go through the process of downing and installing it again. Rather cool I thought so before I did my own update I created the new Boot Disc. Here are the instructions for doing it.
I then went and did the update and had absolutely no problems with it at all. Now this is all by the by because, whilst all that is important, the really important bit is this. If you’ve been to Windows Update recently you will no doubt have spotted that it’s had a rather major face-lift. What you may not have spotted is that most of the main Microsoft site has had one too. It is now multi-browser friendly and doesn’t throw upgrade messages at you. You get the same page whether you are using IE or not. That’s the immediate visual stuff. Under the bonnet though are some really major changes. Many of the tables have disappeared and, whilst not totally so, the whole site has took a massive leap towards Web Standards Compliance.
Now there will be some out there who say “So what, it isn’t totally compliant.” You will all know I’m no fan of Microsoft but what I say to these people is Shut it! Microsoft has obviously been listening of late and this re-vamp of their site is a very major step in the right direction. The last thing they need right now are a bunch of people bad-mouthing them else they are likely to think “What’s the point?”, and head off in the other direction again.
So I never thought I’d see the day but I have to say:-
Yeah!! Well done Microsoft!! Keep it up!!