geek thoughts.

I spent three hours last night freeing my uncle's PC from spyware/malware/"HOT FREE GIRLS JUST 4 U" (it's funny because he's a priest), only to find that some of it decided to take bits of critical data with it, so that his video drivers didn't work.
Checked to make sure that there was nothing hugely important, and then performed a clean install of Windows XP.

Firstly, a 2.2GHz P4 with a fresh install of Windows is pretty hot (given I run a 700MHz Duron, and there's too much random shit on the HD to do fresh installs of Windows. Maybe I'll remember to partition next time.) Secondly, Windows Update is absurd. After setting up his DSL (for some reason, it's a whole lot slower in Surrey), I went to the Windows Update site to see what needed installing. IE crashed because there were so many updates required. Ridiculous.

I then went on to install a firewall, an anti-virus program, an alternative browser, and two anti-spyware programs.

The point?
I really shouldn't have had to. I realize that a large portion of Window's problems come from people searching for holes because it has the largest market share, and that I'm not enough of a geek to talk about how to fix the problems (Jay? Jordie? Matt#1?), but if you can release patches constantly, can't you predict areas of vulnerability and fix them beforehand?

...fuck, whatever. I'm saving up for a Mac.