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February 25, 2006
Why?
I just finished downloading and installing and then downloading and installing further updates for a popular anti-virus package. My current subscription was about to run out and I decided to upgrade to the latest and the greatest for the next twelve months. The whole process has taken the better part of three hours, including a short and then a complete virus scan and three system reboots. It would have taken a great deal longer if I didn't have a broadband network link and a fairly fast computer. Note that, a far as I can tell, I made no errors. I was also able to do some other work while all this was going on but I did need to answer various questions with enough frequency to keep me distracted from what I wanted to do. The most popular question gave me the choice of proceeding or aborting the installation. And then there were the three required reboots.
What I don't understand is, why, when I download the latest and the greatest from the vendor's website, do I need to then download and install a raft of "upgrades" within a few seconds of installing the original download? It would sure make the process a lot less painful if the vendor could provide a single download package that has everything they want you to have at that moment. I understand the routine updates particularly for a program that is in a never-ending battle with the bad guys. But couldn't they get it right on the very first installation of a new package?
A secondary question is, why does the installation program frequently ask me if I want to stop the installation or proceed when from the moment I started the process it should have been fairly clear to any self respecting software that I wanted to proceed. If there were things that I might need to consider, why wasn't I asked about them at the beginning rather than, in one case, nearly three hours into the process?
Well, off to update Shirley's computer and then to figure out what to do about our server. I really don't want to reboot it two or three times. Heck, someone might just want to explain this whole thing to me in a comment while the server is being rebooted and I could lose that valuable insight.
Posted by Duane Smith at February 25, 2006 4:39 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
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Comments
If the upgrades are really updates to the virus definitions, then it's not that surprising that they change really frequently. On the vendor's end, it's probably more efficient to post the patches individually than to reconfigure the combined updater every time a virus definition changes. Of course that makes it more inconvenient for end users. And of course this is just a guess.
Posted by: Christopher Heard at February 25, 2006 6:02 PM
Chris,
That's my guess also. But when I was a marketing manager, one of my goals, much to engineering's dismay, was to make it easy on our customers even when it made it much harder on our engineers.
Posted by: Duane at February 25, 2006 6:49 PM
Try Anti-Vir, it's free and a better bug zapper than "M" or "N". No extended dialogues when you hit a bug, no whining about updates. Plus, it's faster and more comprehensive.
It's not got the firewall, personal protection, spam filet, etc. But unless you're with some cheapo ISP, you're getting that stuff anyway.
One caveat, Anti-Vir run in tandem with either of the two most popular anti-virus packages will drop your system to its knees. Make sure you've disabled the one before turning on the other.
www.antivir.de
Posted by: David Tisdale at February 26, 2006 11:09 AM
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
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