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The false sense of security given by a corrupt security guard...

There really is a limit to the number of chain-saws a juggler can keep in the air at the same... ouch! Oh, dear, there goes another Microsoft component.

Or, to put it another way: "Resist the siren temptation to update Windows regularly!"

This deep philosophical observation arises because I have been running my own IRC server for the last couple of years, and it has been a treat to see how reliable it has been.

People do go on about the unreliability of Windows, and this machine really gave the lie to that. It was an old 32-bit Athlon chip, with no more than 256 megabytes of RAM, and the disk was (and still is) a trivial 20 Gig. It sat under the desk, it talked to the ADSL modem, and it took messages and sent them out.

It Just Worked. Details: Windows XP Pro and (I thought) Service Pack 2. And then, last week, I found a spare 256 meg RAM module and decided to tidy the place up a bit. And that led to a silly mistake.

The mistake was: I discovered that SP2 wasn't properly installed, and so I re-installed it. At least, I tried to. Windows, however, knew better, and insisted that I had to update all sorts of Stuff first.

That included Windows Update and Microsoft Update.

Bad mistake! There followed a period of two days in which the server was, as the old policeman said, "up and down like a bride's nightie." Every time I thought I'd got it working, I found something new had been broken. Every time I fixed the latest wreck, Windows wanted to close the system down, and restart.

At the end of the day, the machine was fully upgraded, and I looked forward to "normal service resumed."

Not a chance...  in the next 12 hours, it crashed half a dozen times, requiring not just a polite "please restart?" on the main menu, but nuclear warfare... the plug had to be pulled. And then the dreaded yellow shield appeared again: "There are updates available..."

The last update was a thing designed to install some of the update mechanism on my PC, so as to reduce download sizes. I looked at this, and thought: "Which costs me more:

Clearly, the first. So why on earth did I say: "Oh...  Go ahead, install..."? The install started, and then stopped. Machine locked. Nothing worked, not even capslock.

Big Red Switch.

So I'm going back to the situation I had before. No updates, no automatic downloads. I'll leave the server there, safely protected by my firewall, and update it every two years as before, and it will just sit there and work.

Technically, I suppose I'll get someone learned saying how irresponsible this is.

In my defence, I'll quote the founder of Microsoft's UK Research Laboratory, the late Dr Roger Needham. There is (he once told me) a point where a project gets so complex, the implications of a change become incalculable.

"You get to the point," said Needham, "where the effect of a bug fix includes the creation of more new bugs than it fixes. When things get that complex, a good strategy is to  install updates only after they've been shown to work reliably for others.

And has Windows reached that point, I asked him?

"Yes."

That was more than five years ago. Things really haven't got any simpler since then, and Microsoft wasn't working under the handicap of trying to maintain Vista a well as XP.

My policy, with  motor cars, is that I don't have scratches fixed every time they happen. Once a year, I take the vehicle to the paint shop and have all the dings and eeks taken out in one short session. I think the car is showing the PC the way forward, here.