I booted my desktop in Windows for the first time in nearly a year and a half of using Linux. I had a perfectly good reason for doing so: defragmenting my Windows partition before moving nearly 50 GB of space from the Windows partition to the Linux partition.
While most of the day was spent defragmenting multiple times, I poked around Windows to see what had changed since December 2009. Some things of note:
My antivirus program, Avira, kept bugging me to update since the version on my computer would be supported through 30 June. This is unsurprising. Versions have to stop being supported eventually, but why can’t antivirus programs of all programs use a rolling release? It would prevent situations like this one if I ever did go back to Windows full-time (almost zero). Besides, lots of people don’t bother to update their software out of laziness. Those Windows updates come to mind here. How many people install those updates in a timely manner, especially since so many of them require restarts? This is one reason I love Linux so much. Updates don’t require a restart too often. Okay, sometimes a program you’re running will close because it just got updated, but maybe you should have closed it when you saw that it was being updated.
While we’re on the topic of system updates, Windows had forty updates ready for me, including the malware removal tool and Internet Explorer 8. To be fair, I wasn’t all that diligent with the system updates, especially because some of them required a system restart, so this number could be lower. I’m not installing these updates because that’ll take more time than I’m willing to invest in an operating system that I don’t plan on using regularly and because I want to see if this number climbs.
iTunes 9.0.2 was installed on this computer. Man, it’s been awhile. iTunes 10 and the logo that everyone has gotten over by now has been out for what, almost a year?
Firefox 3.5.5 is on here. Firefox 4 is out now, with Firefox 3.6 released since Firefox 3.5.
A few other program versions: The GIMP 2.2.10, Adobe Acrobat 7, Opera 10.00, and Microsoft Office 2003. I have a hard time believing that I last used Pidgin in March 2008, considering it had been on that computer for a few months at the time.
I forgot how much crapware vendors put on Windows computers. There are at least five things from HP on my desktop. Half my Windows desktop is filled with icons, quite the departure from my minimalist Linux desktops. I must have learned something from the years of mess.
Well, the defragmenting and disk checks are over. Time to attempt partitioning again. If I’m lucky I won’t have to see this Windows desktop again.