I was at work last night minding my own business picking out photos for Jeepshots when I remembered I needed to burn a CD of pictures.  I put the CD in and nothing.   

Last couple of times this happened, a visit to the Windows Update sight yielded  upgraded drivers for my 4 or 5 year old POS.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

Don't get me wrong, I have the auto-updates on...and the computer tells me when it "wants" to be updated... but I'll usually ignore it because most updates require reboot, and it takes about 20-30 minutes for my computer to get going again from being shut off.  That is, 20-30 minutes until Outlook is up and running, and I can open Word and type and see my words in real time, without a 20 second delay.

So, I was shocked when I got to the update sight and saw almost 70 items.  I mean, it wasn't more than a month or two ago that I updated the stupid thing.

One of the items was winXP SP3... so I figured that if I put that on the computer, most of the other items would go away (you know, an SP is supposed to incorporate and rollup other updates...).  Not a big deal, let's try SP3.  I started that at about 6:30, and it was almost 8:30 before I could the computer again.  And by that point I just wanted to not be in the office anymore and headed home.  But first I needed to make sure Outlook and other programs I depend on were working... tack on another 30 minutes for that, and because of the fresh update, another 30 to shut down, and it was late by the time I got home.

So, I get home, and decide to fire up the work laptop and double check to make sure that the 60-some update items were gone.  Nope... still had 48 items to do.  WTF... Now its almost 11pm, but I decided I'd already lost this much time, I might as well keep going... and send it on its merry way.

Then, since I wasn't getting much done anyway, I decided to update the home computer as well, which also runs XP Pro.  It didn't have nearly as many updates required, but it took almost two hours start to finish anyway... and then I had another hour to baby-sit the work computer before I finally got to be at 2am.

All told, the XP SP3 update robbed me of about 8 hours.