A Long Afternoon with Windows, Then Aspirin

[buzzingrobot]

Normally, I avoid Windows ranting. But... I spent most of yesterday with a friend installing and setting up Win7 on a laptop. My eyes and my head hurt.

Almost 5 hours from booting the install DVD to loading the last update. Installing Ubuntu and grabbing all the updates takes about 20 minutes here.

(Do ISP's throttle downloads from MS mirrors?)

Of course, installing Windows is something most Windows user never do.

Font rendering was third rate. Cleartype made marginal improvements. Bolded text was especially smeary. (1920x1080 15-inch screen). Why hasn't MS fixed this? Windows forums are full of complaints about it. Why spend your time looking at that mess? Font rendering alone would be the showstopper for me.

I took some aspirin and left my friend to chase down apps and deal with security issues.

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

wow only a afternoon for windows upsdates, last time i did that it took a full 12 hours
they just take forever to install, downloading is not usually a issue

[stalkingwolf]

a holiday weekend is usually slow for downloads and voice and video chats. everybody , their brother ,sister, cousin thrice removed, dog cat and bunnies are using the net.

[PaulW2U]

Almost 5 hours from booting the install DVD to loading the last update. Installing Ubuntu and grabbing all the updates takes about 20 minutes here.


Only five hours :rolleyes:


wow only a afternoon for windows updates, last time i did that it took a full 12 hours

May as well do your update at night, go to bed and finish off in the morning or start your update, go to work and finish off when you get home :D


a holiday weekend is usually slow for downloads

I've always found that there are long periods of nothing happening which is most annoying. Downloads have always been fast from Microsoft servers here but presumably the update process spends a lot of time working out what it is or is not going to do. :confused:

No longer suffering these long update/upgrade times. 100% Kubuntu at home. :D

[buzzingrobot]

The thing about the updates is that more updates became available after a reboot following the previous update, so it didn't appear to be something you leave unattended. We went through that loop, I dunno, 3 or four times before we finished. (We used a Win7 Pro SP1 OEM DVD, if that makes a difference.)

Still, it's not like that would be an everyday experience. So, it's tolerable.

The font business would send me running away if I wasn't already long gone. I see Windows fans talking about "sharp, clear, crisp" fonts, but that's not what I saw.

[monkeybrain20122]

Sounds like you spent some quality time with your friend. :)

[King Dude]

My family desktop running Windows 8.1 finally went konk on me a few days ago. I had to get a new HDD.

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

@bizzingrobot

I can sympathize. I have 4 computers that have a Windows partition or VM. I haven't booted Windows in over a year, now that I am retired, and haven't needed it. I have been procrastinating on updating them. I may just keep Windows on my laptop and notebook that I travel with and just have Linux on the 2 desktops.

[monkeybrain20122]

@bizzingrobot

I may just keep Windows on my laptop and notebook that I travel with and just have Linux on the 2 desktops.

Why keep any Windows since you just said you are retired and no longer need it? :)

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

Why keep any Windows since you just said you are retired and no longer need it? :)

I said I "haven't needed it" not that I "no longer need it". As I said, the laptop and notebook are used when I travel. On rare occasions I stayed in hotels were I could not connect to their network without using Windows. The hotel staff were useless because they had no idea what Linux is [Edit: nor how the network was configured.]. It is just nice to have it when you don't have the time to troubleshoot the problem.

[buzzingrobot]

Sounds like you spent some quality time with your friend. http://ubuntuforums.org/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif

Yeah, she needs Windows for her job. In fact, the laptop was one of several ThinkPad's her office held a charity drawing for after they bought new toys. We even spent 90 minutes and $140 driving across town and back to buy the &^@#% DVD.

So, now she's got *two* laptops, one brand new from the office, and one that's about two years old from the office that will spend 90 percent of its time doing office stuff.

[RichardET]

Font rendering was third rate. Cleartype made marginal improvements. Bolded text was especially smeary. (1920x1080 15-inch screen). Why hasn't MS fixed this? Windows forums are full of complaints about it. Why spend your time looking at that mess? Font rendering alone would be the showstopper for me.


I guess I am blind - the fonts on my W530 seem fine. But who knows, perhaps your eyes are superior or something.

[buzzingrobot]

I guess I am blind - the fonts on my W530 seem fine. But who knows, perhaps your eyes are superior or something.

*My* eyes are far from superior. Ubuntu's font rendering, with Infinality's a close second, seems clearly superior, though. I want text on screen to look as close as possible to 300 dpi offset print on paper. What I saw was smeary bold characters, individual pixels visible in non-bolded characters, and a grayish halo/shadow around normal text that became more and more apparent as size increased, to the point the headline text in browsers look decidedly two-toned.

I wonder if, for Window, 1920x1080, is a high-density display, and it's font rendering engines are tuned for less dense displays, since you are obviously not alone in thinking Windows font rendering is OK.

[sffvba[e0rt]

Yup updating Windows is a tedious affair... other than that I can't really complain about it.

[philinux]

I decided to pop into my win 7 partition this morning. Got desktop at 11:30. Checked for updates manually and it found 14 at 70mb. Finally with nothing else running it finished all updates at 12:15. Now I'm back on !4.04 hurrah.

Tedious is the word.

[edit] just had a 14.04 update of 70 mb which included a new kernel. 5 mins 45 seconds total time to download and update. Awesome.

[buzzingrobot]

I decided to pop into my win 7 partition this morning. Got desktop at 11:30. Checked for updates manually and it found 14 at 70mb. Finally with nothing else running it finished all updates at 12:15. Now I'm back on !4.04 hurrah.

Tedious is the word.

[edit] just had a 14.04 update of 70 mb which included a new kernel. 5 mins 45 seconds total time to download and update. Awesome.

I also noticed the time differences in pulling down files of the same approximate size from the Ubuntu mirrors versus the Microsoft servers. I wouldn't be surprised if the MS times are due to efforts to even out the demand, since they surely see very high use. (Some servers may respond faster than others. I've noticed this getting ISO images at releases.ubuntu.com, where the mirror used to supply an image apparently changes from click to click. Maybe MS rotates requests the same way.)

[Roasted]

What frustrates me most about Windows Updates is the way they are structured. It's like a tiered format, where updates DEF might depend on updates ABC being installed first. That results in a perpetual roll of more updates available after each consecutive check and install. Compare this to any Linux distro I've ever used where you update once and bingo, they're all applied.

It's interesting talking with friends of mine about this who are in IT but typically stay on the Windows side of things. They think I need to have an entire array of complex tools and utilities, but in all reality, I want something that is braindead simple to use with minimal fuss. If it has those extra tools and utilities available when needed, that's a bonus.

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

What frustrates me most about Windows Updates is the way they are structured. It's like a tiered format, where updates DEF might depend on updates ABC being installed first. That results in a perpetual roll of more updates available after each consecutive check and install. Compare this to any Linux distro I've ever used where you update once and bingo, they're all applied.
and this is why it took em 12 hours to get a clean windows 7 install up-to date, part of that was sp1 un-installing it self because the system had 2 HDDs, yea a second HDD breaks SP1 installation
during the process of it automatically instillation sp1 and removing it, a full meal was cooked and eaten and it still was not done.
there are 2 requirement to have me use windows, at least one must be met:
1. profit
2. some dumb piece of hardware that will not work on anything but windows that can't be replaced (only applies if i am not the one using the system)

[PondPuppy]

And then there are the antivirus and malware updates. While those are downloading I tend to ponder the differences between reactive and proactive security, and the fact that the next big attack will use a vector as yet unknown to the anti-malware signature databases. And that it will always be thus -- the message will always be "we're great, we fixed it after only 1.5 million users were affected!"

Not that Linux is immune, of course. http://www.zdnet.com/botnet-of-thousands-of-linux-servers-pumps-windows-desktop-malware-onto-web-7000027472/ But the perception of stronger security makes it less annoying to type a long password every time the system needs to run something as root.

[buzzingrobot]

While we're at it, does anyone know if there's anything else besides Cleartype for tweaking Windows font rendering?

When I used Cleartype over the weekend -- the bit where you click on a box of text you think looks best -- I did not see much change at all, for better or worse. (Only the least-bolded text wasn't "splotchy", but, in those cases, individuals pixels were obvious. I don't wanna see pixels.)

So, rather than focus on what I might think looks good, does Windows have any other way to adjust font rendering, period? Are there, say, bits buried in the Registry that are comparable to setting hinting level, type of antialiasing, etc?

For that matter, is there anything like fontconfig that enables font mapping?

I couldn't even find a way to identify the font in use in the standard Windows apps, much less change the size or use a different font.

[andrea b]

Wondering if a committed newbie's notions would be welcome in this cafe? I'm an XP refugee; there was no way I was getting anywhere near Windows 8! Wish I didn't need Windows at all; in a sense, the only 'problem' with Linux seems to be Microsoft. I've installed Win7, and yeah, it takes a loooong time. On the other hand, my commitment to getting one of my 4 ThinkPads to work in its Ubuntu partition has been sort of a game of whack-a-mole. Thing is - as a newbie - if you try to do your best research, read a lot, care a lot, and want to understand it all, then try to do something in a Linux distro ... you're still likely to make a mess. Yes, thank god for these forums. And on the other hand - sometimes the sages and mods have no time to help you, and you flounder. It's easy to give up.

So my asprins have lately been embossed with Trusty Tahr. But I'm really enjoying learning on my mistakes (being all backed up, there's no huge data risk).

About font and subpixel rendering; if you read manuscripts and write a great deal for a living, the subpixel rendering of MS Word in a Windows partition (via cleartype) is often easier on the eyes, at least for me ... seems very individual. I understand why artists and graphics designers hate it - it ain't always pretty. The antialiasing used in Mac OS can make working with manuscripts virtually impossible for long periods - I was afraid this would be the case with Libre Office in Trusty. But Libre Office seems way superior to anything (Pages, Word) in Mac OS for this, and even superior in eye-comfort to Word in my windows partition. (Using Word in the Ubuntu partition is more hit-or-miss - not really satisfactory. Some fonts look 'sketchy' and faint, rather than 'blurry' as they do in Mac OS. And sometimes the font I select is rendered as if not installed...) Compatibility issues make Word in a Windows partition still a necessity at times. Bleah ... sorry if I'm rambling!

[buzzingrobot]

Wondering if a committed newbie's notions would be welcome in this cafe?

More than welcome. Lots of Windows users, and new Windows refugees around here, what with XP and all.


...my commitment to getting one of my 4 ThinkPads to work in its Ubuntu partition has been sort of a game of whack-a-mole.

Dual booting is inevitably problematic. Always has been. Ubuntu on a machine by itself is not. It's considerably different from Windows, but that's a different issue. The last time I dual-booted Linux and Windows was back in NT4 days. (The last time I installed and used any Windows on a personal machine was briefly with the very first XP release.) Understanding the conflicting approaches to partitioning and device names, dealing with boot sectors, MBR, etc., was often tiresome. Today, we can add in GPT disks and Microsoft's leveraging of its clout to make it hard to put something other than Windows on PC hardware. (The Linux standard booting tool -- Grub -- doesn't deserve any points for user friendliness and avoidance of fragility.)


About font and subpixel rendering; if you read manuscripts and write a great deal for a living, the subpixel rendering of MS Word in a Windows partition (via cleartype) is often easier on the eyes, at least for me...

I'm on a ThinkPad W530 with the 1920x1080 screen and an Nvidia K1000 card. I spec'd it out to work well with Linux and ordered it directly from Lenovo. It arrived with Win8, but I intended to keep Windows for a few weeks to try and assist someone grind out some Windows-only work. I have to be honest: I found the font rendering I saw to be the worst I've ever seen, essentially broken. I was surprised Lenovo would ship something that looked that bad. Normal sized fonts were pixellated -- I could see the pixels from a normal viewing distance. Bold text was aggressively smeared and large bolded headline text often appeared to be two-toned, with a semi-opaque gray umbra surrounding the black core of each character. Very fine random strings of grey pixels often curled away from charcters. ClearType made little visible difference, much less improvement. Nor did changing the video driver, switching from Nvidia to the onboard Intel, etc. (As far as I know, no other way to alter font rendering is available in Windows.)

In the end, I didn't have the patience to stick with that, so I turned off Secure Boot, etc., and installed Ubuntu, which I think currently provides -- on this machine, in this setting, and to these eyes -- the best font rendering I've seen (and I used Mac's years).

I've since learned that Windows includes, I believe, 6 different rendering engines. Few developers, I'm sure, code for all six.

That, more than long updates times (which really aren't that burdensome; they can be scheduled) keeps me away from Windows. If Microsoft ever sorts its font rendering problem out, I'd be willing to reconsider. There are also a considerable number of Linux flavors I will not use because of their second-rate font rendering.

[andrea b]

buzzingrobot - Thanks for the welcome! This was very informative and interesting. I'm wondering in which modes was windows' lousy font rendering most troublesome to you? My own references were to the most basic use - reading for long periods in a word-processing application, using a particular font that I can't seem to get away from (and kind of like: courier) - and it's more and more clear to me that LibreOffice beats any other application I've used for this function (compatibility issues aside). The visuals you describe are pretty horrific! More sophisticated users than I am (you sound like a sophisticated user) have long said similar things about Windows (vs. Mac, usually.)

I'm running one single boot Ubuntu machine (this one, a ThinkPad T60) and two dual boot X60s. So far, only one of the latter has given me 'whack-a-mole' problems - on an operatic scale! What you say about dual boot looks as if it may be true, judging by the frantic posts on this site!

Anyway, thanks for the welcome! This is a very rewarding thing to learn...as long as my data is well-backed up!

[sotiris2]

What I find most annoying with windows updates is that they are three-phased. Download and install while computer is running and you can do other stuff if you want (A-okay) it completes that process , you may forget about it, and then when you click Shut-down you 're ambushed by some more obnoxious installing. I think you can choose to shut-down without installing updates but if you forget and just click on the default you are in for a ride, with no chance to abort (like window's checkdisk utility gives you a 10 sec timeout to abort). I 've always wondered if laptops do go on suspend/hibernate if you close the lid while updating and what does happen. Then when you boot up again later you have a shorter install/config time but really? How difficult would it be to install updates in ,if not one, two steps?

Imagine the outrage if windows did update like this but ubuntu did... I installed this stoopid program and it won't let me shutdown my computer!!

[SeijiSensei]

What you say about dual boot looks as if it may be true, judging by the frantic posts on this site!
On modern machines with 4GB or more of memory, I much prefer using virtual machines. On this Kubuntu host I have a VirtualBox VM with Win7 for the few times I need it. On my daughter's Win7 laptop I have a VM with Kubuntu installed. If you choose to give VirtualBox a try, I recommend using Oracle's repository (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads#Debian-basedLinuxdistributions) as described on the VB site. Make sure you install the "extension pack" as well on both the host and the guest(s).

When I've tried to update that Win7 installation, the process seems to freeze forever. From the comments here, I'm wondering if I didn't wait long enough. How long is "long enough?"

I just don't understand how updating an operating system can take as long as Windows seems to. Even enormous updates for Ubuntu, ones in the 300MB or more range, complete in just a few minutes on a decently high-speed line. It could be that my Windows Update program is broken, but I've run the appropriate diagnostics from Microsoft, and all appears fine. Whenever I run Update it just stares back at me saying that it is "checking for updates," but it never completes.

Update: My daughter suggested that using the virtual machine might be the problem. I switched my network mode from "NAT" to "Bridged" so my VM got an address directly from my router and, guess what? The update is taking place as I write this!

[sffvba[e0rt]

One thing to keep in mind about Windows updates is the shear volume that Microsoft has to handle daily... it is a significantly larger amount of systems than Ubuntu.

[buzzingrobot]

One thing to keep in mind about Windows updates is the shear volume that Microsoft has to handle daily... it is a significantly larger amount of systems than Ubuntu.

Yes, but that should not impact the speed of any particular update, assuming MS has adequate server capacity and does not package each update file as one large file containing the relevant updates for all supported systems from which the appropriate updates are taken only after the download is completed.

[sffvba[e0rt]

Yes, but that should not impact the speed of any particular update, assuming MS has adequate server capacity and does not package each update file as one large file containing the relevant updates for all supported systems from which the appropriate updates are taken only after the download is completed.

This is my point basically. They may have enough capacity to make updates available to all users, but perhaps not at the full bandwidth available to each user.

(now for something completely different - it is also very annoying if you have to re-install your OS after making some hardware changes... very annoying :/)

[LastDino]

Why would the bandwidth matter when its not the download part which is annoying in the whole process?

I always downloaded packages I wanted on W7 directly and then installed them manually rather than run the whole process, yes you can do that. I also kept backup of these packages so I wont have to download them again when I do fresh install. I need not say that what I updated was mostly core packages big in the size, you need to keep balance of time to avoid wastage, no point in downloading 1Mb packages separately.

Anyhow, that was never the deal breaker, it annoyed me greatly that this update process would hijack my PC during boot-up for around 1/2 hour or so every time I actually did any update. That's beyond retarded and I don't know who is behind that idea, but he/she has very wrong impression of what we refer to as customer convenience and good experience. Which is something I would expect to be maximum out of product which is selling for $200+.

I'm not even going to mention that genuine check and malicious software remover tool (or w/e its called). I'm still very unsure of its benefits to anyone.

[sffvba[e0rt]

Why would the bandwidth matter when its not the download part which is annoying in the whole process?

I always downloaded packages I wanted on W7 directly and then installed them manually rather than run the whole process, yes you can do that. I also kept backup of these packages so I wont have to download them again when I do fresh install. I need not say that what I updated was mostly core packages big in the size, you need to keep balance of time to avoid wastage, no point in downloading 1Mb packages separately.

Anyhow, that was never the deal breaker, it annoyed me greatly that this update process would hijack my PC during boot-up for around 1/2 hour or so every time I actually did any update. That's beyond retarded and I don't know who is behind that idea, but he/she has very wrong impression of what we refer to as customer convenience and good experience. Which is something I would expect to be maximum out of product which is selling for $200+.

I'm not even going to mention that genuine check and malicious software remover tool (or w/e its called). I'm still very unsure of its benefits to anyone.

Ah OK, the install part wasn't normally my biggest gripe as I would always run the updater when ever I had some free time or before going to bed etc... and since patch Tuesday stopped making updates come very randomly it has worked well for me.

[buzzingrobot]

Ah OK, the install part wasn't normally my biggest gripe as I would always run the updater when ever I had some free time or before going to bed etc... and since patch Tuesday stopped making updates come very randomly it has worked well for me.

My complaint, as the OP, was that the immediate post-install update was an over-long affair that could no be handled unattended because successive reboots triggered more updates until, apparently, the task was completed. I'm not sure I understand a reason to avoid moving all updates at once, rather than allowing Windows to "discover" updates after a reboot. If installing X update means Z update is needed, why not just install Z update then?

It's the broken font rendering, though, that keeps me from using Windows, not the update method.