OT war story / whine: more Windows 8 adventures

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

[The grass is not greener on the other side of the fence.]

Every once in a while, I do update stuff on the Windows installed on my 
various boxes.

Almost the only thing I do on Windows is update things (sometimes 
including the BIOS).  Why do I have Windows?  Because it came with the 
hardware and I hate throwing anything out.  Why do I update it?
OCD, I guess.

I have a notebook with Win8 that I am updating.

First problem: how to find Windows Update.

On the "start" screen you can 
start typing characters and the system will show you program choices 
containing that string (just like Ubuntu Unity or Fedora's Gnome).  That 
gets me "ASUS Live Update" and "Software Updates".  I don't want the
former, and it turns out that the latter is some particular 3rd party
updater that only knows about "Nuance PDF" crapware.

You have to instead click on "Settings" before typing "upd".  Windows
Update seems to be a setting.

When I click on Windows Update, I get some dumbed-down (compared with
previous Windows' Windows Update) thing that gives me only one choice:
to install one important update.

So I say yes, install it.

Moments later it whines that it hasn't been able to check for updates
for a month (duh -- I knew that).  So I said fine.  And it checked and
found a lot to update.

Finally, I was in a place very much like previous Windows Updates.
Where you get to select which updates to go for.  I adjusted the
selection and told it to go ahead with the update.

Then it started downloading.  There was a fair chunk to download.  The
progress bar was one of those that don't actually show progress (a
band scanning across the bar, over and over).  Since the progress bar
is useless, they also tell you in text how much of the download has
been done (why not in the progress bar???).  But the text wasn't
updated from 0% until all of a sudden, several minutes later, it
jumped to 75% or so.

In the middle of updating, I got an alert:

	Click To Run
	Microsoft Office Starter 2010 - English
	This product might be corrupted.  If you experience problems
	with this product, open Program And Features in ControlPanel
	and repair the product
	[OK]

What the heck is that, and why?  Apparently it might be due to some
Registry damage.  Certainly nothing I did.

So Windows Update seems to be worse in Win 8.  Since that is almost
all I use in Win8, I will extrapolate to say all of Win 8 is crap.

Oh wait: there is another task that I've found hard in Win 8.  Quiz:
how do you shut down a Win 8 computer (politely)?

One reason this comes up is that Windows Update wants me to restart
the system.  Windows defers some updating to shutdown time, and some
until the next reboot of Windows.  But if I want to reboot into
Windows, and I do a restart, I have to watch like a hawk during the
shutdown portion to catch grub and get it to boot Windows (not the
default).

When I rebooted, one of the "tiles" on the desktop, a headline, looked
interesting ("Trudeau smoked pot after becoming MP").  So I clicked on it.
Somehow, without showing me an article, it tells me I need to update a
bunch of "apps" (presumably to see the article).  It's 5 minutes later
and I still haven't seen it.  Why didn't Windows Update update them?
Why do I want these apps anyway?  OK, now it is finished and it has
forgotten that I asked to see an article.  Sheesh.

These live tiles are pure distraction.  Who knows what resources they
are using.  Even the "bing" app, for searching, is constantly updating
to show me what's "trending".  "Finance" alternates every two seconds
between th S&P/TSX Composite index reading, and the same headline for
a dumb article ("is raising a child easier financially than ever?).
Ahh: if you right click on a tile, you can choose "turn live tile
off".

PS: maybe there is a disease going around.  I find Ubuntu 13.04 and
Fedora 19 update GUIs much worse than their predecessors'.  So I just
use the text-base commands.
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