A Gentle Reminder

I was gently - ok forcibly - reminded yesterday why I appreciate the Network Install Disk concept.

The Network Install Disk is a concept that says, this CD will give you a very minimal system, just enough to get the basic commands working and then hook up to the network. From there, we'll upgrade the underlying architecture if we need to, and then install the most recent version of the programs you want to run. The benefit to this is you don't have to install the program, then download and patch using Security Update 1, then Security Update 2, ... then Security Update 347 (you get the picture). This is in comparison to the Snapshot or "Gold" concept, where the installation always contains the same version of every program.

Why did this come up? Well... I reinstalled Windows on a PC at home. This is a box I've been playing with for a couple years -- the one that my Mother-In-Law gave me. It was time to retire my daughter's computer (which wasn't top of the line when Windows 95 dropped), and seeing as she was probably going to need Word to work on schoolwork next year; I figured I might as well bite the bullet.

At this point, I had two choices. I could either try and track down a English-language version Windows XP OEM disc image that had SP3 on it, or I could use the system recovery discs that came with the computer. At one time I had an SP3 disc (my laptop has a valid license); but I couldn't find it. So again, I gritted my teeth and went through the process of restoring Windows.

For reference, using a network install disc, I can go from a wiped hard drive to a completely updated Debian or Ubuntu system in slightly more than an hour. I can get Puppy Linux up and running in about half the time. Gentoo takes me a little longer, but that's because I have to compile Xorg.

Did I mention that the recovery discs don't even have SP1? Yeah, it took me over 6 hours from putting the first disc in the drive until Windows quit wanting to install more security updates. And there's no reason to not install the security updates for Windows -- and every reason to do it as soon as possible, especially when it's connected to the internet.