Nick Jackson

Who remembers the internet back when ‘Broadband’ was an amazing marketing opportunity at 512Kb/s? Now, who remembers 56Kb/s modems being all the rage?

Here at Brayford Quay, modern, plush student accommodation with en-suite sit-down showers, a desk and 6 complementary power sockets, over the wired network, I am pulling downloads at an amazing, awe inspiring, jaw dropping… 4KB/s (Or, for the technically minded people who spotted that one is bytes and one is bits, around 32Kb/s). That means (And I’ve checked this) it would be faster for me to write a letter back home (On real paper!) asking my parents to download the files I want, post it, wait for it to be delivered, wait for my parents to download the files, and wait for them to be mailed back to me on a DVD. That’s including the weekend.

“How?” you may ask. To put it simply, I’m downloading Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition RTM (Ooooh…) so I can do some programming of C# with debug tools, which Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition (What a mouthful) doesn’t have. This is a rather nice 3389.6MB of software developing goodness, which at 4KB/s takes just over 10 days according to a combination of Google and my maths. Understandably, this upsets me.

This is merely the culmination of what has been an interesting day wrestling with OS X, Boot Camp and Windows XP. As you may know, I’m a Mac user. Sadly all the programming tools I need, like Visual C#, run on Windows (Mono be damned, it’s a pain to use). Obviously I need a copy of Windows, so off I go to my trusty downloads repository (Yes, I have a valid and legal CD key and licence for the software, but downloading ISOs saves me carting around a mountain of disks) only to find that a prerequisite for downloading Windows is… Windows.

Off to the computing lab I go, where I promptly set my download going to my thumb drive whilst wrestling with Adobe Premier. The download finishes, I go home and kick Boot Camp into action asking it to give me a 32GB partition for Windows. Boot Camp - for the uninitiated - is Apple’s way of letting you run Windows on its Intel based machines. However, down this path lurks disaster as Boot Camp informs me it’s unable to partition the disk, and I should repair it. To repair a disk in OS X you restart your machine with the OS X disk in the drive and hold down C, which I did. Utilities… Disk Utility… Repair… 20 minutes later back comes a message that nothing was wrong, but my disk has been repaired. Fair enough.

Back to Boot Camp, 32GB partition again. It works! I slip in my Windows XP disc (I burnt the ISO onto it earlier the first time Boot Camp was trying to partition). It… doesn’t install for some unknown reason and drops me out to a “Press any key to continue” screen at which no keys work. Try again, works first time, but only after I eject and re-enter the disc. By this stage I’m having flashbacks to installing Windows 3.11 and Windows 95 with their persistent “Insert disc 1, insert disc 5, insert disc 1, insert disk 2, insert disc 1″ crap (Windows 95 came on a set of floppies if you wanted it to, and it’s still - if you’re daft enough - technically possible to do the same with Windows Vista). Reboot into Windows, insert the Leopard CD to get the drivers off it, reboot again (A Windows 98 moment here) and wonder of wonders… I’m in Windows.

But as you know, at this point the joy is just beginning. I hit the download sites I need for Visual Studio, Windows Update, and Steam (I’ve got a Windows machine, I may as well use it for games). Only to find that MCW’s marvellous piece of network topology and configuration leaves me with a combination of 4KB/s for the 3.3GB download, and somewhere between 30KB/s and 100KB/s for everything else, prompting me to write this diatribe.

Since it’s taken me so long to write, you’ll be pleased to hear that my Visual Studio is hurtling down the copper at a nice 80KB/s or so (Subject to sudden and seemingly cause-less fluctuations), which if you do the maths means I get my dowload in closer to 12 hours than 10 days. On the downside, Steam is now actively downloading sweet FA, which is upsetting because I want to play some of the Portal challenge maps. I’ve given up entirely on Windows Update because I can’t stand being told to reboot every 10 minutes because of an ‘essential’ update.

Tags: Apple, Boot Camp, Brayford Quay, C#, download, internet, MCW, Microsoft, network, Portal, slow, Steam, Visual Studio, Windows

This entry was posted on Friday November 23rd 2007 at 11.33 pm and is filed under Rambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.