Love that OS!

Today, let me tell you about my experiences with the Windows operating system. At work, I have a Windows machine and a G4 Mac, and as I'm doing most of my work on Mac OS X, I usually don't have to think about Windows a lot. It's just that sometimes the world outside is entering my protected little world with force.

First, the Blaster worm brought our network down. I was one of very few people on the network who were not affected because they were still using Windows 98 or the Mac OS, but a network with most computers down is not exactly a network any longer.

As soon as the network was back up again, I was hit by the Sobig.F worm. It couldn't infect my Mac of course (Macs are immune to most Windows worms), but I was being inundated with dozens of infected e-mails from outside, more than half of them actually being bounces sent back from other mail servers, because the worm had used one of my addresses to send out infected messages and some of the server-based protection programmes apparently think it's better to bounce mails back and thus infect other people than simply deleting them.

Update: The Register has an article that Sobig.F is the fastest growing worm in history, accounting for 1 in 17 email messages. However, in my case it was more like 6 in 7 messages.

Then I tried to install the new Windows 98 security patches on three computers and two Virtual PC installations (Virtual PC is an emulator that allows Windows to run on a Mac). One installation worked as expected. On the second computer, I was unable to install more than one patch at a time (which was a bit tedious with four patches to install). The third computer crashed during install, then refused to start up, and required a complete re-install of Windows to work properly again. The first Virtual PC installation demanded that one patch be installed again and again, even though it had claimed before that the installation was successful (it finally worked on the fourth attempt). Finally, on the second Virtual PC, the automatic installation via windowsupdate.microsoft.com simply failed, and also failed to provide any information whatsoever why it had failed (the download was simply aborted; it had worked fine with previous patches), so I had to manually download and install every single patch.

I'm sorry, but this is something of a sick joke. The OS is not supposed to be this faulty in the first place, and then the patching mechanisms are supposed to work as advertised.

As I see it, the only reason that Microsoft is still in business must be IT departments who promote Windows because they know they'd be out of their jobs immediately if they switched to a different, less faulty OS. Or it could also be that users think Windows behaviour is normal and every OS is like this. Which is not true. Believe me, I've wasted more time dealing with the security leaks, strange quirks and complicated setup procedures of Windows than with any other computer-related issue.