Hi Bobbie:
That has not been our experience.
Thank you for offering a single data point (your experience). However, to
peremptorily dismiss the advice we offer, we would expect rather more
evidence to substantiate your claims.
Our advice is based upon the experiences reported by several thousand users.
Rather more than just me. And 'just me' is 'just me' on multiple machines
over a very long time. I've installed SL on over three dozen machines,
including 25 last week; we just got through doing a Mass Update, upper
management is insane. Never had to do a clean install. Not even once. I've
been doing updates on Macs since, well, since there have been Macs. never
done a clean install. Not even once.
Again, what "you" did is a valid datapoint, but it does not negate the
advice we offer, which is designed to produce a good user experience under
all possible circumstances.
I guess from the confidence with which you express yourself tat you have
extensive experience in system maintenance and keep your system running very
clean. That does not describe the majority of our audience, who bought Macs
so they could avoid thinking about system maintenance at all, let alone do
any.
Oh, yeah. I've been running Macs (and Windows machines, and before that DOS
machines) for over 20 years. I've had to do many, many, MANY clean installs
on Windows boxes, including last week when we had to move a whole lot of
machines from XP and a bunch of others from Vista to Windows 7 during the
Mass Update. That was a pain and a half. It was a good thing that we could
generate a few disk images or we'd still be at it. Macs are _easy_ to
upgrade.
System maint on a Mac is a lot simpler than on Windows. No playing with the
Registry, 'cause there's no Registry. That kills a whole lot of problems
right there, including the primary reason for reinstalling apps from disc. No
HAL nonsense, either, so that a system that works on one Mac should work on
another (within certain limits, of course; OS X 10.6 doesn't work, period, on
PPC Macs, and it can be a pain to get PPC Macs to boot off of hard drives
partitioned using GUID) and that makes generating disk images a breeze
compared to Windows. A bunch of required operations on Windows are simply not
necessary, or in some cases even possible, on a Mac.
However, one thing that _everyone_ has to do, even on Macs, is to ensure that
his disk directory is healthy. On Windows, you really should run CHKDSK at
least every every so often just in case, and getting something that checks
the Registry and something else which does a little defragging would be a
Good Idea. On a Mac, run Disk Utility every now and again, especially just
before doing a system update. On both, back up early and often. If you fail
to do that kind of thing, you _will_ be sorry. Time Machine on Macs makes
that easy. Windows really needs something of the kind. (It should be noted
that sometimes TM backups get corrupted, at which time the only cure is to
start a new backup. That's why work machines may get backed up using TM, but
also get backed up using good, old-fashioned, but known to work, backup
software to good, old-fashioned but known to work, tape, every night. It's
not paranoia when they _are_ out to get you.
If I may make another point, this is NOT "USENET". Sorry, but it's not.
The USENET group you are looking at is a very secondary output from the
Microsoft webserver (and not even the main
www.microsoft.com server at
that...) The replication out to the newsserver is a favour done by
Microsoft to the people who spend a lot of time offering help in here. We
tend to prefer NNTP for speed and convenience with threaded discussions when
answering questions. But more than 90 per cent of the "customers" of this
service neither know what USENET is, nor use it.
Ah. I'm seeing it on a USENET feed. My error. That explains all the HTML crap
cluttering up the various threads. On some threads, half of the messages are
unreadable because of that.
What I am leading up to is that we could do without the "robust" language in
here: this is a "family newspaper" (you will find that your post has been
stripped from the web servers the majority of the audience is looking at,
there is an automatic "Naught Word Filter" running as part of the anti-spam
service.
Opps. Sorry about that, I'm used to USENET, where I'm one of the more
softspoken people around... I'll try to be more circumspect.
Our experience is different. You do not, of course, have to update
"immediately". But if you do not do so before starting any piece of
Microsoft Office, you will end up with munged preferences that will give you
grief until you flatten it and start again.
The machines I'm responsible for at work are behind a good firewall and we
have adequate A/V stuff, so running SU isn't a big deal at work. My home
systems are usually updated from my very own little update server, which
grabs the updates for me (Windows, Mac, Linux) and from which I can update
without going near the internet on the individual machines.
Before the Daemon starts is the key, and the daemon will be started by the
first Office application that starts.
I usually turn off automatic updating on all my systems at home 'cause I want
to control when things get updated. I let the server grab updates, I test 'em
out, and then I have the server drop them onto the relevant machines at a
time and place of my choosing. Usually this means at about 03:00, when
everyone's asleep and any reboots which might be necessary won't cause
problems.
