Why I hate Windows
On Friday, I installed a copy of Windows 7 on a new VirtualBox virtual PC.
Yesterday I set about installing software into Windows 7. In the course of the installation, I noticed that Windows was downloading updates, though for some reason it wouldn’t load the progress screen.
When I finished my installations I checked, and I was informed that all downloads were complete. I switched off Windows 7.
As expected, The power down produced that familiar screen – to the effect that Windows is installing updates and that I mustn’t power off or interrupt the process. Apparently there were 150 updates to be applied. That was at 4pm.
At 11:15pm the process finished and the virtual machine powered off.
Seven and a quarter hours to install software that is already downloaded? And during this time the machine was useless in that I couldn’t run anything on it or power it down? That has to be some kind of record?
And on the next power-up it still took a further ten minutes to “update the registry”.
Just in case anyone wonders why I hate Windows and love Linux………..
Nope, I don't wonder at all why you hate Windows. Unfortunately, I have to keep Windows 7 on my wife's computer due to her use of Paint Shop Pro which will not run on Linux Mint, even using Wine and Wine is still a pretty half-baked way to run Windows software on Linux.As far as updates are concerned, updating a fresh load of Windows can take over an hour on a hard drive install so the length of time you experienced must have had something to do with VirtualBox settings (CPU, drive space, memory alotted, etc). To little memory will keep things moving to the paging file and that slows things way down. But I agree whole heartedly. Windows is a pain.
There are a few programmes I have that really only work under Windows such as Live Writer and Textpad [the only text editor I have that will hanle ANY file at ANY size!]
I had the VM set to 1Gb memory which should be sufficient. I did set it to dual processor but it seemed happier and faster with single.
Today I had to fire it up again and yet again had about twenty wasted minutes while it updated. Linux in the meantime had about thirty updates which downloaded and installed within five minutes in the background, with no reboot or any other interruptions.
Anything less than 2GB on windows 7 is asking for slow. At least 2 on 32bit windows and 4 on 64bit windows is required in my experience.