Machine minding

An uneventful few days. I took Andrea to her train on Tuesday morning, went into the office in the afternoon and to Chi Gung in the evening. Wednesday in the office was devoted to preparing the mailing of a dozen letters of invitation to prospective members of the Crime Reduction Partnership Board of Management for the inaugural meeting at the end of the month. Once the job was done, I had the task of re-assigning and setting up the new HP desktop PC for the Administrator to use, as it didn't suit Ashley's workflow pattern. Julie now has one machine with the office accounts on it and another for managing the rest of her labours. Getting that right also involved moving the printers around, but in the end, there were improvements all round.

What I hadn't bargained for was a massive twenty two item system update installation from Microsoft, which effectively took four machines in succession out of service for at an hour at a time. Downloads happened in the background, but then, when installation started, system reboots were required which took an age to complete. I was left machine minding, and got home much later than expected as a result. It was the same with Windows PCs at home as well. I was grateful for the use of several Android devices to consult until the job was done on a further three machines.

I went into the office early on Thursday, as I'd forgotten the night before to install our standard backup software on the new HP desktop, which Julie is accustomed to using at close of day. Then I had to wait while my office machine did its updates, as I'd not got around to it the day before. Luckily most of this week's waiting time was done when there wasn't a need for all the machines to be in use, and other things could be done not requiring computers in the meanwhile. Big companies can afford a tech guy to waste his time machine minding, or devising clever automated routines to run updates network wide, but I'm not that clever. 

It did make me wonder however just how many hours of productive time the world's billion computers take up waiting for updates - well, probably half of them don't bother installing updates, don't need to, or are designed beautifully to update in the background without interfering with anyone's workflow. But still if it's half a billion PCs, taking a total, say, of fifteen minutes waiting time a month, that's three hours a year, fifteen hundred million hours productivity time. Just say two thirds of those are updated out of work hours by corporate IT staff, that's still five hundred million wasted hours a year. Apart from the hours re-deployed by meticulous planners who factor in tea breaks, assignations, keep fit routines, or a trip to the shops in their down-time. Thankfully, the rise and rise of Linux based equipment via Android and Chromebook operating systems is effecting a necessary change in this. Will Windows ever catch up?