(no subject)

[nonelvis]

I have just finished installing Parallels Desktop and Windows XP on my Mac. I can't even begin to express how weird it is to be typing in iChat or Safari while seeing the XP interface lurking in a window below.

On the other hand, once I got the right version of Parallels installed, Windows installed easily, and Windows Update is merrily chugging away in the background downloading ... something. PC folks: do I want SP3, or will it make me hate life? Pretty much all I need to do with Windows is look at web pages I am building, so as long as my version of Windows is running the correct security updates, I think I'm all set.

Comments

[haineux.livejournal.com]

I haven't run a virtual PC in a few years, but here's what I remember.

When I installed, I guess it was XP, the first thing I did was to go and ask for all the updates. There were like 23 of them, and some could only be installed by themselves, and others could only be installed in certain combinations of this-or-that-but-not-both. So it took me a few rounds to install stuff, and as I installed stuff, more updates appeared. (I am told this is much better these days.)

I forget how many times I went around on this. Like, most of an afternoon. Rebooted what seemed like 100 times. But with a virtual PC, you can just save off your entire machine as a backup, in case something explodes, so why not?

I told my pals who use Windows, and they were aghast. Eventually I figured out that they would not install any updates unless they felt they had to, because every update had a large chance that something would break. I guess that makes a certain kind of sense.

Then I thought about the Mac attitude, which is, always install updates because they might fix something.

Somehow, this doesn't seem all that much better...

(Well, maybe that's not 100% true. Sometimes updates speed things up, or add whizzy new doo-dads -- not so much, now that Sarbanes-Oxley has set in, but still.)

[nonelvis]

Unless I've heard otherwise, I always install my Mac and Windows updates, because inevitably (especially with Windows), there are necessary security fixes. Windows Update seemed a lot more complicated than Software Update, but maybe I'm just not used to it yet.

For the most part, I only care about whether someone can crack into my machine if I leave it unpatched. I need to do so little under Windows that there's just not all that much that could break if I take the wrong system update.