I Love Microsoft.

Not.

It had been a while since I updated any software on my computer, and so I updated Spybot Search & Destroy (which you really should be running if you are not, by the way). While the new version of Spybot was checking for just under 300,000 Bad Things, I headed on over to Windows Update.

While waiting for 316MB of Windows XP Service Pack 3 to download, I decided to do a little homework and see if anyone had any problems installing it (yes, I do live under a rock, how did you know? ). I had expected the usual "my random strange configuration won't run right" you find after every major update.

What I didn't expect to find, and in retrospect it flew by under my radar because I was in the hospital for a week when #3 was born, was that XP SP3 automatically installed on some computers and oh by the way ho-hum

completely killed a jillion PCs running AMD processors. Hmm. Good thing I don't have my box set to auto-update eh. Okay, so it turned out not to be quite that bad and it was mostly with ASUS and HP equipment, but still.

Is it really too much to ask, that your computer wakes up in the morning after installing an update? Really?

I know, I know, blah blah Mac Linux Ubuntu pwns blah blah. I got the box I'm typing on for less than the hard drive in it cost at retail, and at that price, I'm not switching OSes just so I can be MS-free while I blog & check my e-mail, sorry.

Since this all happened in the first quarter of the year, and we're looking at the end of the year, and I haven't really done anything to this box in the interval, maybe it's time for another off-site backup refresh.

Oh well, at least with XP SP2 I haven't had to do the annual Nuke-and-Pave reinstallation ritual that windows 9x called for due to generally increasing crappiness over time.

No immediate threats found on Spybot, by the way. Thank God.