The computer gods have not been kind to me this past month.  My laptop HD that my wife uses crashed as well as my HD on my desktop that I use.  Fortunately, I have a backup of the data. 

This past Sunday, I purchased another HD, this one a 40GB.  Since this machine is primarily my wife's that she uses for grad school, this was more than adequate size.  It's an HP with XP Professional SP1 and came with system recovery disks.  After I replacing the HD and installing the 7 System Recover CDs, I was able to begin the Microsoft Updates.  This is when I realized enough is enough.  Here is what happened:   (Keep in mind these are just High Priority updates, not Software, Optional or Hardware updates.)

Go to Windows Updates

Download and Install 2 Updates, Validation tool and Genuine Authenticity

Reboot

Go to Windows Update

Download and Install 20 Updates

Reboot

Go to Windows Update

Download and Install Service Pack 2 (SP2) (why I had to install the previous 20 updates is beyond me; I thought SP2 was to be inclusive of all previous updates)

Reboot

Walk through installation of SP2

Go to Windows Update

Download and Install 2 Updates

Reboot

Go to Windows Update

Download and Install 75 Updates

Reboot

Seeing the 75 updates was the icing on the cake.  99 updates plus SP2.  Not to mention my time in doing this.  Talk about being non-productive...

And if that was not enough, here is the scenario for my desktop.  The OS is Windows 2000 Professional SP2.  Since I've reformat and reinstall my OS every 2 years or so, I had SP4 on my network.  I installed SP4, ran Windows Updates and downloaded/installed 2 updates.  Rebooted and repeated the process.  This time  I needed 55 updates. Not quite as bad as the XP install.

Because of my "Download Sunday", my next computer is going to be a Macbook.  Not that Apple does not have patches/updates because they do, but OS X is not nearly as porous as Windows.