Friday, February 24, 2017

To Update or Not to Update?

Every second day, like clockwork, a little notification dutifully pops up somewhere around the bottom corner of my laptop screen, solemnly announcing the need for new updates that cant wait to be installed; all I had to do was say yes. For those of you who still don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s the little notification that, when clicked, says something along the lines below:


Now, I’m never quite sure exactly how to feel about these updates. It’s a bit like the weather in Bangalore right now – you cant decide whether it’s the winter part of spring, spring itself or summer already. The mornings make you feel like it’s still cold, that uniquely pale-shadow-of-winter type weather so characteristic of Bangalore winters. It’s weather that warrants the use of a light jacket and the exercise of a modicum of caution when it comes to consuming all things cold. Yet by mid afternoon the sun is beating down on you so fiercely that you’re cursing global warming and once again dreading that the upcoming summer is going to be the worst ever. You can’t quite decide whether you should be having cold water or simply having a cold, and you end up having both and promptly falling ill. In short, you’re utterly confused and don’t quite know which way to go with weather like this.

Coming back to the updates, on the one side it warms the cockles of your heart to know that there are thousands and thousands of programmers slaving away over their computers day and night so they can improve your experience every two days in ways you’ll absolutely never ever notice. While you go about your everyday life, they’re busy fixing bugs you didn’t know existed and making infinitesimally small improvements all the time in case you thought they just went off to hide under rocks once the software or application was created. But hey, it’s the thought that matters, so even though I never feel the need for an update, I should be grateful for it. And I always was.

Until.

This one occasion, back in younger, more innocent times when I would blindly let the system install all the updates it ever wished to, the laptop just crashed without explanation in the middle of one of these updates. I mean, sure, a laptop never crashes and then offers you an explanation for it, but the system updation, with its alluring promise of a smoother experience and fixed bugs and eradication of all problems big and small, had instead gone and done the opposite – crashed and made me lose everything.

So I have every reason to stiffen into a state of suspicion each time that notification for updates pops up. And while I would like nothing better than to simply ignore it and forget about it, it just doesn’t pan out that way. The first few times you’re able to dismiss that notification with a spirit of reckless abandon, but slowly it starts worming its way into your consciousness. Each time you fire up the laptop, it’s just there; this little red circle gnawing away at the back of your mind like the time you’re not quite sure if you’ve switched the gas off. Sure, you can ignore it for a while, but it’ll keep coming back. It’s like switching your phone off in a flight during take off – you know that it probably won’t really interfere with the plane’s signals and cause it to crash into the ground, but just in the one-in-a-million chance that it does, why risk it? It’s the same with the updates – you’re quite sure it’s probably useless and wont make any difference, but what if there’s a new super mega virus or Trojan horse or other similarly devious malware created by an evil Eastern European computer hacker that will cause your laptop to crash while everyone else stays safe because they’d installed their updates and you didn’t?

And this is only the laptop that I’m talking about – on the phone it’s almost impossible to ignore these updates beyond a while because it’s always there until you haven’t installed it, and the list keeps piling up the longer you put it off. Straightforward game apps where you cant, for the life of you, see any avenue for improvements are constantly hankering for updates. Even things I didn’t know my phone had, like a plug-in for a Korean keyboard, something I’ve never used and never will use, conscientiously needs to be updated every few days. And while the updates haven’t caused my phone to crash yet, I know that they keep eating into the storage space until a day will finally come that everything is so updated that my phone has no space left to perform any other function.

That, if nothing else, might finally get me to buy a new phone!

3 comments:

Magically Bored said...

Buy a new phone! Good idea. :D

Orgho said...

Haha, right! One day it'll happen, don't worry ;)

tania said...

I always ignore these updates and never bother,hate waiting for a few minutes and have never felt the difference. But then again,every now and then saurabh takes my phone and keeps updating and updating! Possibly that is why I can't make out the difference, someone else takes care of the maintainence. Well written.