Comparing and contrasting ...

I'm sure that my beloved wife doesn't read this. If you are reading this, stop now. And you've been touching the monitor with a KVM. Windex it, please.

She's had bad luck with laptops, so she has decided that she wants a desktop PC. It's the season, and Jesus would want Kerry to have a PC. That's fine. She's been using my #2 because her last laptop is flaky with networking and I don't know why. I suspect it's the cheap PCMCIA wireless NIC. Anyway, it's an old machine in poor shape, so why not.

But she wants Windows, and she wants Word.

It's 2am. Nearly 2:30. I wake up in five hours to go to work. And I've just found the magic to fix this:

The Windows Installer Service cannot update one or more protected Windows files.

That's useful. That's really useful. I mean, that tells you exactly ... nothing.

I had to Google it, and there I found out about the magic of Event Viewer.

Product: Microsoft Software Update for Web Folders (English) 12 -- Error 1933.

The Windows Installer service cannot update one or more protected Windows files. SFP Error: -536870654.

List of protected files:\r\nc:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\40\bin\fp4autl.dll

So there's a DLL for a web server extension that is causing installation problems. Meanwhile, I point out, it's for a web server. This is Windows. I want as few open ports as possible. So, web server?

I'd also point out that, right before, I installed Google Pack and OpenOffice.org with absolutely no problems. Just click and go. This is Microsoft's flagship software. This is the product that keeps Bill Gates in Hohos. And it installs that stupid?

I keep considering in contrast the zen simplicity of sudo apt-get install foo...