Autopatching? Nah, it's Only 2006

Over the weekend, I had a fit of consumer confidence, and bought myself a new $100 ATI Radeon 9550 video card. Being a naive and trusting sort, I hit the "Express Install" on the shipped CD, and it was pretty good -- ran through all the zillions of prompts automatically. This was the first time I can recall that "Express" really means "Express."

Unfortunately, it didn't work so well. It occurred to me about three quarters of the way through that I'm going to have to do this all over again if I want the latest and greatest patches. Which brought to mind the question of why, in the U.S. market, full of consumer broadband, do I have to do this install/download/patch dance any more? It seems like any software vendor should build into the installer an out-of-the-box option of, "Do you want to download the latest patches from your Internet connection? Note that this may take an extra 10 minutes."

It seems like this would be one really good way to get the brand new end user out of the unpatched backwater of shrink-wrapped CD's in the shortest amount of time, especially if the installer is smart enough to use the local copy and just download a binary diff file full of the patches, if it can do some simple ping tests to ensure connectivity.

Heck, come to think of it, this is how Debian Linux and FreeBSD work now a-days, pretty much. But, for some reason, this is beyond the prowess of all those mighty mainstream Win32 developers. Is there some kind of marketing reason not to do this?

Oh, and here's a troubleshooting tip I couldn't find on Google: If, after installing your brand new ATI Radeon 9550, you get horrid startup errors involving cli.exe and other ATI helper applications, just run through add/remove programs and uninstall anything that says "ATI" on it (except the "Drivers" entry, of course). Yes, this means you miss out on all those fifty zillion extras, but if all you're after is playing Evil Genius and Civilization IV without stutters, this will do the trick.