Of the 9 Windows XP updates I needed, this was one of them.

April 29, 2002 3:02 AM

Of the 9 Windows XP updates I needed, this was one of them. I've updated once before. And mind you, nor do I use my XP partition, but to grab photos off my camera and the rare must-see Quicktime experience. This is what an "update" entails in Microsoft territory apparently.
posted by crasspastor (11 comments total)

I kept waiting for the joke to become apparent until I realized that it wasn't a joke, which makes it even funnier than if it had been.
posted by iconomy at 3:24 AM on April 29, 2002

It isn't a joke??? :)
posted by banished at 3:26 AM on April 29, 2002

Let's see. If this if this page isn't yanked or changed in the process of the day. I've got an image. Mirror? Better yet, take your own screenshots and mirror them yourselves.
posted by crasspastor at 3:43 AM on April 29, 2002

It's actually a serious problem (and not just for that movie). I remember a mordantly witty headline in The Register about it a while back. it's to do with using Rich Media in the DVD menu's or somesuch. You can imagine how long it took to get fixed as soon as bill took home his Disney DVD collection...
posted by nedrichards at 3:50 AM on April 29, 2002

here's the article in full: "Anyway, the question is: which dwarf is Disney most like in its total failure to realise that people may want to use the DVD in a machine running Windows XP? Doc, Happy, Bashful, Sneezy, Sleepy, Grumpy or Dopey?"

It's really Disney's problem BTW.
posted by nedrichards at 3:52 AM on April 29, 2002

How exciting it was to feel as though I'd let the cat out of the bag. Momentarily.
posted by crasspastor at 3:56 AM on April 29, 2002

I wonder what's in this update that they aren't telling you about?
posted by SpecialK at 6:25 AM on April 29, 2002

If you want funny Microsoft Knowledge base articles, try this.
posted by mmascolino at 7:19 AM on April 29, 2002

It's been up on the windows update site for almost a month. What?

Looks like a legit software fix to me.
posted by Leonard at 7:31 AM on April 29, 2002

There is a small group of about 10 dedicated coders at microsoft, who are called "the app compatability group", it is their job to find places where someone has written an application that incorrectly calls the windows-API, causing a crash. If the faulty-product is popular enough, they rewrite the OS so that that particular app, in that particular instance, won't crash anymore. A very difficult job, given that they are working from the assembly of some third party software, generally. Apperantly a Disney movie is considered popular enough to make the bar for a fix...
posted by nomisxid at 8:38 AM on April 29, 2002

The thing is, to a PC user who doesn't really know anything about how these dang things work (and that is almost all of them, the collective wisdom of MeFi users notwithstanding), this update is about as important as any other. He/she wouldn't know what to do if he tried to play the DVD and it didn't work; it would just be another mysterious quirk in the box.

Not that you can count on those users to update their OS, but, hey, you can't have everything....
posted by mattpfeff at 10:07 AM on April 29, 2002