Why are Windows updates so slow (and long) with VISTA

I'm on my second day of installing updates at a painfully slow pace since reinstalling Vista yesterday. The reason I had to reinstall was because Vista had become so slow and erratic my machine was virtually unuseable. I've done a speedtest on my connection and it's running at about 4Mb/s, but has taken about 2 hours to get half way through a 107Mb update and now doesn't seem to be downloading anything at all. Anyway, I've had enough of Windows, I certainly won't be buying Windows 7; Microsoft have had too much of my money and failed to deliver... my plan is to install Ubuntu with a dual boot and only use Vista when I absolutely have to....

.. So 2 years on (since the original post) and there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

Good on ya Microsoft !!!

Updates are way too slow.

I can just imagine what world would be like when everything moves into the "cloud".

Wow!  Wasn't expecting to see this many recent posts!  I'm doing a clean install for my stepmother.  After having the Update DL basically hang at 88%, I got frustrated, stopped, and then cut the DL down to 50MB (Security Updates only).  It's been over 1 hr on a cable connection, and is still only at 18 of 54 on the install side. 

On a side note, I don't seem to have a long wait for window 7 updates.  However, my company provides us imaged HDs which already had most of the updates, so I'm only taking small ones weekly.  Although, I assume all W7 updates just after a reformat is just as brutal as Vista.

IMHO, they need to stop trying to innovate and increase user experience for existing products.  All this captial, and yet worried about capping DL speeds....

Ubuntu can update important info and not have to restart. When they do ask to restart your computer it takes less than 30 seconds to do so. Experiment and choose wisely.

Ya I'm with you guys on the slooowwww updates. I reformatted my pc yesterday and am STILL downloading updates! And I have FiOS! Vista updates are trash. Not only does it take long to download updates, it even takes 15 minutes for it to just search for updates sometimes! That is complete ****!