Grrr.
I’ve been installing WinXP Pro for most of the day now. After switching back to the “classic” UI so my retinas stopped bleeding, I’ve been working through installing firewall, virus protection, SQL Server, IIS, etc…
Holy crap.
They must lock their engineers into a room and tell them to figure out the most annoying, non-intuitive ways of doing things (and presenting info to the user).
This started as a rant on our Mantis bugtracker, but it’s just gotten worse since I wrote this:
Still installing and updating WinXP. Holy crap that’s one bad OS. Ugleeeee. Designed by folks that should be kept in a server room somewhere…
What do I care that an update download is for KB826939, or that it is 5.300000000001 MB? How do they measure the .000000000001MB? Why on earth wouldn’t you just round that off? At a glance, it doesn’t even look like a meaningful number. I thought it was a serial number or something silly like that, but looking closer, it’s just providing waaaaay too much insignificant detail. Good freaking lord, they’re a bunch of rabid morons.
Little things, like, say, turning on the web server. I had to poke around for settings, run a network config wizard, and Add Software (which has been running for over an HOUR now – I could have compiled Apache FROM SOURCE in that time!). I’m guessing it’s going to take some mojo to actually get IIS running, after it’s been installed.
On MacOSX, it’s a quick trip to the System Preferences application, click a checkbox, and IT’S DONE. Web server enabled, with public directories for each user, and a big honkin’ Documents directory for the whole server (with CGI-EXECUTABLES and everything).
Wow. No wonder there is such a market for Windows IT folks. Someone could make a career out of installing Windows.
It takes me less than an hour to install MacOSX from scratch. With all services I need enabled and running. Securely.
UPDATE: It’s been “configuring components” for the last half hour. Getting a little nervous that installing a simple web server needs this much configuring. What exactly is getting installed, anyway? It’s just supposed to be a service that spits out text and/or binary files over HTTP on request. yeesh.