When Windows Vista launched, I did something that most self respecting geeks wouldn’t dream of doing.  I upgraded from XP instead of flushing my system for a fresh install.  I thought, “What the heck? What’s the worst that could happen?”

Upgrading to Vista turned out be no be too bad, actually.  At the time that I upgraded, Vista had only been out on MSDN for a few days and was not in general release at all.  The biggest issue I had was with ISV software that would not run on Vista.  It took a few weeks to get hot fixes for things like Mind Manager.

My biggest issue at the time was with printing.  There was a defect in Vista (a known defect) that caused the print spooler to die abnormally in systems that had been upgraded from XP.  I was unable to print for almost a month. I was tempted several times to roll back to XP because of this, but I never got around to it.

One day, I forgot that it wouldn’t work and printed again from my Vista machine.  It worked perfectly. Why? Windows update, that’s why.  I was able to look into my Windows Update history log where I saw the update that fixed my system.  I have to hand it to Microsoft on this one, they released a bug fix and it just worked.

This event was a few months ago, obviously.  But this Dr. Dobbs article reminded me of the incident and how worthy of note it was. Self updating software really has come of age.

David Starr