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August 15, 2005
Marathon
Little did Paula Radcliff know when she set off on her winning World Athletics Championships marathon race, that I was also participating in a similar task. I decided to install Windows 2000 on my home PC.
My harddrive died completely recently, which is pretty lucky as I only just realised I was under prepared and backed everything up a few months ago. But I had a spare 40Gb drive at the back of my desk (well, doesn't everyone?) so I set to work on it.
The actual installation is pretty painless, I picked nothing unusual and let it run it's course. Then I installed the graphics drivers (I refuse to work in 800*600 16 colour mode for more than 5 minutes). Even the Buffalo USB wireless card worked first time and DHCP to my router upstairs automatically connected me to the internet with no problems.
As Paula hit the 15K mark, I was going strong, but then the real battle began - Windows Update.
It would seem sensible for Microsoft to have some kind of mass update that you can apply to a new install. Vulnerabilities are discovered all the time, and software is tweaked and upgraded. My Win2K CD only contains an old 5.0 release of Internet Explorer and MSN Messenger won't even install with that. But all the updates are separate, and many of them have to be installed exclusively, and the PC needs to reboot every single time.
So I gainfully struggled on, and broke away from the pack, as the list of updates required gradually shrunk, and finally passed the finish line in front, with a nice fresh clean and shiny installation, about two and a half hours later.
I didn't get a personal best (11Mbps wireless LAN is too slow for that and there were many Mb of downloads), but then neither did Paula.
Posted by se71 at August 15, 2005 03:22 PM
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