Thursday, April 11, 2013

Filing taxes - Hateful Windows updates

I actually don't mind filing taxes proper, but the process is a bit painful.

It starts with Windows.  I use Turbotax that runs only on Windows/Mac.  Now I don't have a Mac so I keep a boot of Windows on a couple of machines.  Day to day, however, I run Ubuntu.  The net of this is that the Windows installs don't get updated.  Step 1, then is to update Windows.

To say that this takes time is a monumental understatement.  Rather like saying that sending a spacecraft to the moon takes time.  I'm now about 3 hrs into installing sequential updates and hope to finish in about another hour with no more than 4 or 5 reboots.

As if it wasn't painful enough, the Windows updater is both slow and uninformative.  It's hard to tell if there is an update in process or what.  A web search yields a sort of solution, but really, shouldn't there be some status display.

Downloading Turbotax is simple enough, but it, rather reasonably, doesn't want to install while an update is in process.  So we wait, then wait, then wait, and then wait some more while Windows update does its work.

Along the way, Norton is screaming about being out of date since my Norton subscription is out of date.  It came with Comcast/Verizon but since I no longer use Comcast ( I happily fired them ) and Verizon has decided in its ill advised way to charge $10/month for a $60/year product that I don't really need I have to de-install it.  Since I don't much use Windows it makes sense to depend on the Microsoft Security Suite. Getting rid of Norton takes yet more time and another reboot or two.  During the de-install the machine can't be turned off.

Now nearly 4 hours later, I can install the previously downloaded Turbotax!  Now things get easy and I can file our tax returns.

Well, not so quick!  Turbotax needs to do its own updates.  I'm not entirely sure why since it was just downloaded.  But there is hope.



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