A few weekends ago I finally started the upgrade project for Rochelle’s computer. She’d been running Windows 98 for two years, and it crashed all the time on her. So I was going to upgrade her to Windows 2000.
The job was truly unbelievable. It is amazing how bad the experience of installing Windows is. I spent 8 hours installing a chunk, rebooting, downloading an update, rebooting, changing a setting, rebooting. I must have rebooted the computer 15 times while installing Windows and all of the updates to it from the Windows Update web site.
It took me way longer than I’d expected or planned for, and it caused a snit with Rochelle when it threatened to delay heading up to Napa. (Things only got better once we were on the road, and realized we were in danger of pulling a hat trick. Rochelle was speeding, had lost her driver’s license, and I had let the vehicle registration expire by accident.)
In the end, her system is upgraded, and running much better than previously. Windows 2000 is OK once it’s installed, though nowhere near as reliable as our FreeBSD server, which has run for 6 months without rebooting on more than one occasion.