Apple Software Update for Windows Rant
Sometimes the bredth and scope of the stupidity of the oversights of intelligent people can be staggering. I’m sure many of my friends will agree.
Today is the turn of Apple Software Update (ASU), a windows program that runs once a week to check for updates for quicktime, iTunes, Safari and the like.
As some of you will know, we suffer from an ongoing network issue here at work: every now and then we suffer a small amount of packet corruption. It doesn’t affect browsing the web, or email, or instant messenging much. But it frequently breaks large downloads over http: .iso images and large zipped or compressed files (such as update executables) tend to get corrupted and unopenable.
It’s a lucky thing, then, that ASU has a built-in checker to make sure that the files it downloads are the same files that they meant to download, right?
Wrong. ASU finds corrupted files fine, but then proceeds to deal with them in the worst possible way: after telling you that the file is corrupt (or more accurately, that it has an ‘invalid signature’), it gives you a chance to install the updates again. What it doesn’t do is re-download the update files; someone thought it would be a good idea to cache those. Admirable in other circumstances, all it means is that ASU continually fails verification tests on these files, and the updates are never installed. At least until newer versions are released or the downloaded files are flushed/deleted (not found out where they are yet).
Let me rephrase that: If something goes wrong when it’s downloading files, My update programs inhibits me installing updates.
August 9th, 2007 at 11:35 am
I found the offending .msi files here:
%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\
Deleting them has allowed ASU to re-download.
I don’t know why the files weren’t deleted by clearing Internet Explorer’s cache. Perhaps I misunderstood its function (delete the blog post I was halfway through, perhaps)?
August 9th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Other things I hate about you, ASU:
August 9th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
I hate that it tells you when an updated version of iTunes and Quicktime is out, just because I have QuickTime installed. Even if the update fixes issues in iTunes (that I don’t have installed) and isn’t a security update for QuickTime. At least they let you hide the updates, but I wish they wouldn’t try so hard to push iTunes onto me.
Mind you, I get just as annoyed with other updates that try to include things like Google Toolbar/Google Desktop (e.g. Sun’s JRE updates).
October 13th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Diabolical … by someone at Apple with a wicked sense of humor. Sure the offending files we need to delete are found in :
%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\
But somone at Apple said “wouldn’t it be funny in Windows Vista if we store our downloaded files in a folder that even the administrator cannot manually clean up? bwahaha”
April 24th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
thanks for the help. this worked.