Another, big batch (27) of security patches landed on my Windows 7 desktop. Since I’m likely to be running long, data-intensive jobs, I have it not apply them right away. Sensing this large group would necessitate a reboot, I avoided installation until lunch time today. The philosophy is simple: computing should not be about constantly applying software patches. One of those Windows update failed. I rebooted and tried again. Same result:
Borrowing a scene from Pulp Fiction, this is kind of how I’m feeling at the uninformative error message:
Do they speak English on Code 80242009?
Clearly this error code has some meaning to the programmer who tests for that condition; it’s unfortunate they cannot use an informative error message like “Microsoft’s update site is borked; ignore this until we fix it next Tuesday.”