Microsoft is Magic

Back in the days of Windows 98SE, it would take hours to get a stock install machine up to date. The procedure was something similar to this:

1. Boot the machine. It's increasingly common for the BIOS to recognize the CD-ROM drive at boot time. For consistency, boot from a floppy disk with system code installed on it via "sys a:".
2. Partition and format the disk with DOS tools, usually the 3rd party aefdisk program and FORMAT.EXE.
3. Get a CD-ROM driver installed somehow, usually through the Win98SE CD-ROM. Catch-22, anyone?
4. C:\>D:
5. D:\>setup.exe /ie /iv /im /in /ih
6. Install the OS.
7. Install any necessary network or video drivers manually.
8. Update IE to version 5.5 or, preferably, 6.0.
9. Go to Windows Update. Download and install everything you can.
10. Reboot.
11. Repeat the previous two steps until there's nothing left to do.
12. Add your own melange of customizations, including the Windows 98 Shutdown Supplement and TweakUI.

Fortunately, the Windows NT branch introduced the idea of service packs, so if you can get your hands on a newer Windows NT/2000/XP installation CD-ROM than the one you've used for the previous few years, you can skip a bunch of these steps and streamline the process:

1. Boot from the CD-ROM. In modern machines, this is a default behavior that is usually configurable in the BIOS.
2. The NT installation routine can partition and format the drive automatically.
3. Install the OS.
4. Install any necessary network or video drivers manually.
5. Go to Windows Update. Download and install the necessary ActiveX-style web utilities.
6. Download and install the "Genuine Advantage" tools. Verify with Microsoft that you are not a criminal.
7. Click either "Express" or "Custom" options. Windows Update will discover and sort needed critical updates so that you don't necessarily have to keep rebooting and revisiting the site to get them all.
8. Reboot and revisit the site to verify you've gotten all the needed updates.

That is a lot less aggravating than having to do every step by hand. The further back you get from the latest possible CD-ROM, the more steps you have to add. For instance, if you only have a Windows XP SP1 CD, you have to go and install Service Pack 2 first. Windows Update can do this for you, but you can (and probably should) do it manually.

So Microsoft, through careful development of software on update.microsoft.com and the Windows Installer utility, has eliminated the hassle of "find an update, reboot, find an update, reboot...." Currently, a brand-new XP SP2 install requires 33 additional updates from Redmond. I'm not concerned with the size so much as I'm concerned with the ease of getting them and the safety of the system until the updates are complete.

Used to be that if there was a critical Windows patch that you needed to install on all your systems like yesterday, you ended up taking offline as many systems as you could afford to lose, go get the update, put it on a floppy or a CD, take it around to your machines individually, and bring them back online one by one.

That was a total pain in the ass. Nowadays, XP SP2 has a piss-poor-but-better-than-nothing firewall, so you don't necessarily have to sweat about how vulnerable your machine is while you use it to go get the update you need.

Deep down I know that that's a false sense of security, but I'd rather put a firewalled PC on the network than a non-firewalled one any day of the week.

As my XP SP2 machine gets those 33 updates, I'm not really worried that it will get compromised before it has time to install them all. These 33 updates are about 20MB, which if memory serves me correctly, is roughly as big as all the updates that Microsoft made available to XP Gold (before SP1) on October 26, 2001: the very next day after it hit the shelves. So why aren't I downloading 40MB of updates? Because Microsoft is magic. Or, at least, they understand that overworked sysadmins would rather download 33 updates than 66, and so they keep putting newer editions of the same old operating out there for me to use.

It may be questionable, in terms of license, to use an XP SP2 install disk when you reformat an XP SP1 machine, but I doubt it. It saves me about as much time as a single call from the BSA asking me to explain my actions would eat up. I think I want to make a copy of this XP SP2 install disk in case this one ever gets eaten by wolves. It is just so damned handy.