Firefox just notified me of the available 3.5.2 update. I figured what the heck and told it to apply the update. After the update was applied, Firefox restarted and then I got a notification that one of my addons, the .NET Framework Assistant, is incompatible with the new version of Firefox and has been disabled. Truthfully, I don’t know what that addon does, but if it was something I used regularly I’d be pretty ticked off that Firefox decided to disable it. The update software should have checked for incompatible addons and notified me before applying the update.
I spent entirely too much time last week configuring our new machines, installing Windows, configuring updates, and getting the machines installed and running at the colocation facility. After obtaining a USB diskette drive so that I could install BIOS updates, I ran into a problem where the BIOS update program wouldn’t work. It took a while, but I finally tracked the problem down to the fact that we got OEM machines. That is, Dell makes them exactly like the PowerEdge 1950, but they don’t have the Dell brand on the outside. For reasons unknown to me, you can’t install the PowerEdge BIOS on the OEM machines. You have to find the OEM BIOS on Dell’s site.
The OEM BIOS, by the way, comes in Windows and Linux versions, diskette, and as an ISO image. Why doesn’t Dell supply an ISO for the regular PowerEdge BIOS?
If you’re installing Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista from the original distribution media (that is, the 1.0 distribution), do the following.
- Install from the original source media.
- Download and apply the Service Pack 2 update. This is a big download: over 500 megabytes for the x64 version of Windows Server 2008. And it takes an hour or more to install. Be sure to reboot after the update is applied.
- Go to Windows Update and apply all other updates, rebooting as recommended.
- Finish configuring your system.
If you do anything else, like applying interim updates before installing the Service Pack 2 update, or try installing roles or Windows components before applying all of the updates, you will very likely have trouble. Trust me on this one. It vexed me for almost two days.
I suspect that some sequences of updates end up causing incompatibilities. I can’t prove that, since I didn’t keep track of the order in which I applied updates with the machines that went wrong. When you think about it, it’s pretty amazing that Windows Update works as well as it does. Whatever the problem was, I found that I can avoid it by following the procedure above.
Note to software vendors: update notifications continue to pop up in front of whatever I’m working on at the moment. It’s bad enough that you found a security problem in your application that requires me to update. But to interrupt what I’m doing by bringing your silly update notification to the front is horribly bad manners and you risk me wondering why I put up with your crap at all. Make those notifications less intrusive, dang it!