Vista Service Pack 2

So I check my bandwidth usage so far and it is below halfway toward the 5GB monthly limit with only about ten days to go for this month. I decide to install the Vista Service Pack 2 now instead of waiting until the end of the month. The download is 343.9 MB according to the update but the download amount is 122MB (for the whole day) according to NetMeter and Windows Update has started and is preparing my computer as I type.

Knowing Windows this means I'll have to save this blog on the hard disk and then restart the computer. This is one of the worst things about Microsoft and their updates, it was a perennial nuisance in Windows 95. Anything you installed wanted to reboot your machine. I would have thought that Microsoft had learned the lesson but apparently not. At least there is now an option to delay the reboot, from time scales of ten minutes to four hours.

Yup, Windows wanted to restart. Then it spent ten minutes telling me not to switch off my computer, five minutes of black screen and then another five minutes of Windows telling me not to switch off my computer. It doesn't seem any faster or better. I think it’s a ruse. You download a small file and it makes small changes. The rest is a simple while or for loop counting down seconds and displaying information. It’s like those 0870 helpline numbers: you know you’re not waiting on an operator becoming available, they’re just keeping you waiting until they’ve ticked up some cash. Boy I’m feeling paranoid tonight.

I’ve still got a lot of books to read through. The novelisation of Star Trek was mince. I'm not inclined to go and watch the film on that showing. Maybe I wont even get it on DVD.

I got the replacement Interzones and that's further fiction to go through. Although being short stories they are a little more appealing than a novel. Poor Iain M Banks and his novel Matter are still at the bottom of the pile. And that after me reading the novel Vertigo by Bob Shaw again. I had only intended to skim through it to refresh my memory when writing about his works on one of my other blogs but I got sucked in and was about sixty pages or so in before I realised. I thought I might as well finish the novel having read that far.