Just purchased a Dell Dimension 9200 for work with Windows XP Pro SP2 on it. No office, just plain vanilla.
Out of the box it required 62 Updates from Microsoft, 96.6MB download, estimated at 44 minutes using a fast ethernet connection.
Sixty two. On a brand new machine. And I haven’t even gotten to removing all the trial-ware cruft, installing drivers, or dealing with software updates.
After the reboot, I needed three more operating system updates, an additional 3.7MB and another reboot.
This doesn’t even count application patches that will be needed.
This movie is so true. I’m used to not having to do this.
As an amusement, I noticed Dell’s new ordering website would allow you to pay for them to remove the trial ware. Yes, you read that right – they’ll put it on for free, but you have to pay for them not to. Go try their site, it’s at the end of the PC design process.
Update: After installing applications, needed another 2 updates. IE 7 came along in the last set of updates. Oh, by the way, IE 7 blows up at least three times a day for us – it is not stable, IE 6 was much better.
Update 03-Nov-2006: For complicated reasons had to rebuild the Dell from scratch using the OEM disks. This time, 74 updates initially. (At lest Dell had done some.)