Article Written for the Killarney Outlook 28th March 2008

About 18 years ago I attended a conference run by Compaq in Auckland. The hotel where the conference was held was full of computer techies and every evening many of us would congregate at the hotel bar (as one does) and swap tales from the front-line of support and as there was around 80 to 100 of us there was a lot of stories.

On one occasion my colleague’s bleeper went off and every single engineer present looked down at their bleeper to check who was calling. Of course this was considered quite funny at the time but on reflection the consensus was that we needed to get a life!

Nowadays we all carry mobile phones so now the same conference would have 50 people at the bar and the rest standing around corridors or outside with the mobile glued to the ear; on the whole conferences aren’t what they used to be. However, it must work for us as recent statistics show that Ireland has 800,000 more mobiles than people so, presumably, the people who really need to get a life in today’s society are those who frequently carry more than one mobile phone!

The conference, as I remember, included a discussion on the mechanisms that Compaq provided the third-party engineers to download the latest drivers and patches so that the equipment could be supported properly in the field. Every so often a new driver or patch would have us beating a path to our customers to install them.

One would have thought that over the years the cycle of updating would get less as system software matured, but no, updates to peoples systems happen daily now but most are done across the web and people do not plan for them. System updates used to entail planned downtime, backups of the existing system so that a rollback was possible and so on. In other words it was a big deal. Of course, even today on more critical systems this is still the case but for most these updates just happen in the background and no one notices.

However, for all you Windows Vista users beware. Service pack one has been released for manual download on the Microsoft Update website and will shortly become an automatic rollout. Vista users should know that this Service Pack is a big deal. It is known to cause problems to some systems so the advice is to take the manual download before the automatic one rolls-down so that you can plan the installation and ensure that you have a backup of your system first before you install so that you can restore if necessary.

If you intend to wait for the automatic update make sure you have backups of your system just in case. As ever, if you’re unsure then please give us a call.