{"id":698,"date":"2010-02-04T01:05:25","date_gmt":"2010-02-03T23:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/?p=698"},"modified":"2010-02-04T01:05:25","modified_gmt":"2010-02-03T23:05:25","slug":"the-windows-treadmill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/?p=698","title":{"rendered":"The Windows treadmill"},"content":{"rendered":"

I own a laptop that came bundled with Windows Vista. I installed Linux as fast as possible, but left Windows as a dual-boot option mainly to check that things behave nicely in Internet Explorer.<\/p>\n

And a good thing too, because they usually don’t.<\/p>\n

I also keep it because I own some junk<\/a> hardware<\/a> that also doesn’t play nicely with Linux.<\/p>\n

I boot into it about once a month – the last time was mid-December. I always enter with trepidation, knowing I’m about to install countless Gigs of security and anti-virus updates.<\/p>\n

This evening I booted into Windows at 22h02, and immediately kicked off the Windows, Windows Defender and AVG updates. The updates finished around 00h30, and I’ve probably blown February’s bandwidth.<\/p>\n

Shortly after finishing, I was alerted to another update. It seems they arrive faster than I can download them.<\/p>\n

About an hour into downloading the patch for the latest gaping hole, a dialer popped up, so a hole was probably exploited in the interim.<\/p>\n

I’m now scanning the entire system – who knows how long that will take. Perhaps I was a bit ambitious in hoping to get back to what I was doing by, say, 22h05.<\/p>\n

For the average user, who perhaps doesn’t appreciate Freedom<\/a>, or ever run into the frustrations of not having complete control of their system, there are still two huge advantages to running Linux.<\/p>\n

One is having access to tonnes of fantastic software in one place – the default repositories. No need to trawl the internet for dodgy freeware, or head off to Incredibly Expensive<\/a> software shop to buy something that’s freely available.<\/p>\n

The other, of course, is that the obligatory anti-virus software takes up a rather large proportion of the system’s resources, and uses up a nice chunk of your bandwidth too.<\/p>\n

And unless you use the machine regularly (and therefore update regularly), the chances of exploitation, even if you immediately install the updates when you do log on, are high.<\/p>\n

The scan’s still running. Perhaps I should get this blog post up before my Windows partition is formatted…<\/p>\n

Related posts:<\/p>\n