Do you recall that cartoon with Chester, the little, bouncy, yappy dog that flitted between the feet of big bulldog Spike? “Hey Spike! Hey Spike! What are you gonna do, Spike?” He’s annoying, constantly in poor Spike’s face. Spike can tell Chester to shut up and Chester might shut up for about a minute then pop right back up. The Windows XP installer perfectly emulates this activity.
“Sure Chester, I’ll let you install the updates you wish to install to plug the security hole you didn’t patch in the last update 2 days ago. Thanks a ton for letting me work while you do that. All done? Great. Now’s not a good time for me, so please shut the hell up for a while.”
Then, like clockwork, Chester pokes his little head up. “Hey Spike, wanna reboot now?”
“How ’bout now, Spike?”
“Wanna reboot yet?”
“I’m busy right now, Chester. Go away.”
Moping.
“Now?”
And it’s hard to just ignore because, as good UI design dictates, the window Chester uses to ask pops to the foreground so if you are, for instance, typing a blog entry you’ll have to reach out to the mouse and click on the browser window to get focus back.
I’d like to throttle Chester.
This should solve your problems. If you don’t need a Core 2 Duo, then you should be able to get a sub-$1K deal.
And when you must use Windoze, try Parallels. It works extremely well.
And I would welcome you back with open arms… but it may take a while to forgive you for leaving.