MS conspiracy theory 7.0 and a slow new year

Whatever was I thinking? All set for a relaxing Christmas Eve, when I snap-decided to upgrade my desktop pc to Windows 7!

I bought this machine at a time when only Vista was available, not long after it superseded XP, but before XP started to become available again, as people revolted against Vista.

To tell the truth, Vista had not been the problem for me that it seemed to have been for the vocal... umm... majority? so I had been in no great rush to upgrade to W7 when it was released.

Except for one thing.

Since around June or July, my computer has had a constant case of 'update-itis'. Until then, I'd get 3 or 4 notices from Microsoft every month that I had updates to install, and I'd restart my machine, and they'd download and install.

But around 6 months ago, the updates started to come more often. Daily, in fact. And since I'm on a relatively low monthly download limit, I couldn't 'afford' to download them all the time.

Now Vista was cunningly set up to save time and electricity by being able to go into sleep mode when the computer was not in use, BUT, if there was an upgrade to download, it would automatically do so if you selected to put the pc to sleep (instead of turning it completely off). By late July, I was forced to either turn my pc completely off, or leave it constantly on, all the time, because I constantly had upgrades waiting - one 'critical' one of which would download, but fail to install *every time*!

Finally, I decided that the only way to fix this issue would be to upgrade my way out of it, so I made the fateful decision (ok, on the spur of the moment during a late Christmas shopping expedition at Myers) to buy the Windows 7 upgrade.

I can't say that I wasn't warned of what I was in for, though.

As I purchased the box, the sales assistant asked me if I had ever installed a Windows upgrade before. When I told him that I had, he advised me to ***call a friend to help before I tried installing Windows 7***!!!!!

OMG... what had I done???