Tue 9 Jun 2009
Last week, I helped a friend to acquire a laptop for her work. For a basic user, who is mainly interested in accessing her mails and ocassionally doing some internet search and social networking through chats and portals such as facebook, we assumed that GPRS internet subscription will be the way to go.
So we quickly subscribed for a 500MB/month plan. I have been using the same service on my ubuntu linux setup and have found it very useful… even at meetings, I always have web presence, and this has been very helpful in staying in touch with my office even whiles on long hours meeting outside
My colleague has also subscribed for the same service and has been enjoying his holidays ever since. Except for certain developer requirements such as version uploads which are bandwidth intensive, and the inability to use ssh, the 3.5 GPRS service has been relatively good experience.
It was therefore shocking to realize that after 3 days of little browsing here and there, the 500MB subscription had been exhausted when my colleague who is more prone to bandwidth consumption is still below 500MB even though he registered 1 week earlier.
Guess what? Windows Vista had within 2 days, downloaded updates of over 70% of the total bandwidth allocation for the month, reason for which the monthly investment had finished so rapidly.
Even though Ubuntu and other Linux distributions prompt for updates, they do not do any download until the user has specifically requested so. This enables us to only request for updates whiles we are at work and economize our meager GPRS subscriptions whiles at home.
Windows distributions however by default automatically download updates and thus DENY the user of this selective approach for economizing bandwidth on thin networks.
FIX: You should switch to prompted download under the windows update settings