Wednesday, October 20. 2004

So recently I made time to maintain what was becoming a large digital mess inside of my computer at home. Although as one might expect my Redhat 8 installation was in perfect condition and operating just fine, the Windows XP installation I had for a dual-boot was all but completely shot. Since I installed Windows after Linux, and I figured it was time for a clean sweep anyway I just went ahead and nuked the entire computer (minus archive partitions) and re-installed fresh.

After installing Windows 2000 I did two things:

1) Downloaded Firefox to replace Internet Explorer

2) Went straight to Windows Update to fix all of the security holes they've found so far in the operating system.

One of the upgrades that Microsoft provides is of course for the vast quantity of security holes in their Internet Explorer browser (Service Pack 1). Although the download and installation went smoothly, upon reboot Windows 2000 was completely unstable. First off, I couldn't even get the system to boot without blue-screening about some sort of kernel-level uncaught exception, then once I got it to finally boot the scripting engine which powers so much of Windows was shot to the point where I could barely get IE to uninstall.

Needless to say, this is a perfect example of how an architecture which attempts to be everything to everyone is a really bad idea. That service pack should have never crashed the entire computer. However, it's a likely scenario when you tie critical system components like the kernel directly into things like a web browser as our good friends at Microsoft did when they attempted to side-step their legal troubles. Regardless of whatever stupid reason possessed them to do it, when upgrading your browser can take down your kernel there is an obvious and significant flaw in the architecture -- one that once again reaffirms my loyality to alternatives.

My advice? Do what almost 20% of all internet users are doing now and go download Mozilla firefox. I promise you installing it will never bring down your kernel, isn't prone to system-threatening security holes, and best of all just works.