Despite being a bit of a Mac fan, I don’t make a habit of bashing Windows or Microsoft - I got bored with all that religious warfare 20 years ago, and I happy live and work on a combination of OS X, XP, and Vista.

There are times, though, when I am rudely reminded why exactly it is that I like Macs, or rather, why I don’t like Windows. Today is one such occasion. All I’m trying to do is install the “Service Pack 1” update to Visual Studio.

You’d think - naively - that it is just a case of downloading an installer, running it, perhaps restarting. Sadly, when I did this, the installer sat there for a couple of hours, stuck at an unknown point of the install. Four or five slightly different attempts later, it is still doing the same thing.

After various searches of the internet I came across the release notes for SP1:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/2/8/A2807F78-C861-4B66-9B31-9205C3F22252/VS2008SP1Readme.htm#Installing

This read me lists nineteen different known issues with the installation process!! WTF?

These are major issues which prevent you from installing an update to an IDE. That. Is. Fucking. Pathetic.

As if that wasn’t bad enough - none of them appear to be my problem. Remind me again why I bother using this shit?