Updates knocking on the door!

Ah, updates!

I remember that, back in my days as a Windows ME user, I learned to be truly afraid of them.  Updates were supposed to help your computer but, almost inevitably, something would go very wrong after applying them.

I would have thought that, by now, Microsoft mastered the process of providing updates that do not break your computer.  However, that is not the case.  A colleague told me that her husband applied updates to her Windows 7 desktop and the old MS magic was performed just the same: the sound card went crazy and refused to work with the microphone and the webcam also stopped working.

And then, there's the celebrated Microsoft update to convert your Windows 8 RT computer into a Windows 8.1 RT... brick!  It went so bad that Microsoft had to prevent people from installing it.

I don't know if they fixed it but, according to this post, the update to Win 8.1 now seems to convert your computer into a cat (because it does not play nicely with mice).

To be fair, I have also heard complaints on updates coming from Linux users.  I myself have messed up with some Linux installs because of carelessness during the updating process.  My last experience was when I tried to install PCLinuxOS 2013.10.  Of course, it was all my fault: I had been sluggish with my bi-weekly updating process and, being PCLOS a semi-rolling distro, that is a rather serious mistake.

I learned my lesson and today's PCLOS update went smoothly.  It was a major one, too: it converted my KDE 4.10.5 laptop into a KDE 4.11 machine.

By the way, I am also getting a Mageia update with Firefox 25... At last!  This thing of not being able to read PDF files directly from the browser was getting me frustrated...

It's great that updates come around!