Unbundle me

Friday, May 9th, 2008

I installed Windows XP SP3 on my home PC this morning. The process went smoothly, and surprisingly quickly; but after the inevitable reboot a screen came up pestering me to turn on automatic updates. This I do not appreciate.

It’s not that I think automatic updates are necessarily a bad idea.* But why bug me about it now? I can only surmise that Microsoft really hates the fact that I’ve chosen to manage my own computer; so they’ve decided to tack a nuisance requester onto an unrelated process in the hope of nagging me into quiescence.

This sort of opportunistic piggybacking used to be the preserve of spyware. But, sad to say, these days I’m increasingly finding unrelated crap bundled into otherwise legitimate packages. (more…)