X
Business

It's all in the updates

We might have ditched floppy disks, but not much else has changed, says Angus Kidman.
Written by Angus Kidman, Contributor

Remember when installing applications was a slow process that involved changing multiple floppy disks? We might have ditched the floppies, but not much else has changed.

The other day, I installed a copy of Microsoft Visio 2003 on my machine. The installation of the main program went as smooth as silk, and was completed in well under five minutes.

However, adding in the updates proved to be a rather more tedious process.

Even though the patch for Visio was a comparatively scant 32MB and I was on a high-speed ADSL connection, downloading and installing took a solid 15 minutes -- and when it was finished, I was instructed that the machine had to reboot.

While it's often tempting to ignore such messages, Microsoft's fondness for integrating its applications (read: one of them crashes and everything goes) meant that this would probably be a foolhardy proposition.

Add in the reboot time and we're looking at a solid half an hour to install a single desktop application.

Quite how this qualifies as working more efficiently, I'm not sure. It's still a lot better than Visual Studio, which took about half a day the last time I installed it, but I can't help thinking that we should be able to do better in this day and age.

Editorial standards