Still Standing

Christopher Smith — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:09:00 +0000

For those of you who still care about Vista, I “upgraded” to SP1 and didn’t encounter any of the problems that a lot of others have had.

The 127 MB download took forever (like 45 minutes despite our pricey DSL connection), and then the installer popped up a dialogue saying that it needed at least 3GB of disk space on the main Windows partition and wouldn’t install until I made room. I’m trying to figure out how a rational person could think that a 127MB download might need 3GB of disk space to complete (yeah, I can see contrived situations where it’d be possible, but come on!). I dutifully cleared away like 15GB of downloads that were just sitting around on my drive, ran the install, dutifully rebooted the system as one would expect from Windows, and then confirmed that the entire install had consumed ~800MB of disk space (I’m guessing a 2:1 compression ratio, binary diffs, plus backing up the old files for rollback pretty much explains all of that).

You know, it is sad enough watching those progress bars behave like meandering drunks stumbling to the next bar during the later hours of a pub crawl, but really, is it so hard to have a reasonably accurate estimate of how much disk space is needed for an install?

Xblog: Still Standing

Still Standing