Windows Still Sucks

Seems that Dr. Heinous and I weren’t the only ones experiencing the fun that is a totally unjustified Windows O/S FUBAR. Pixy has also been experiencing the joy that is Bill Gates hellspawn.

I got home this evening to discover that there’d been a blackout while I was away, and all the computers had shut down. So I power them all back up, and the Linux boxes seem to come up (even the broken one – see comments to previous post). But not the Windows box. Oh no. It won’t even try to boot. I put the Knoppix CD in, and it doesn’t seem to like that either.

I want to check on the Linux boxes, but I normally access those via SSH, either from my Windows box – which is dead – or from my Notebook – which might as well be dead, since after I got it back from “repair”, where it was wiped and reinstalled, I wiped it and reinstalled it again, whereupon it promptly went back to its crashy ways so that I never managed to install any sort of useful software on it.

So I have:

One Linux box which has the best part of two terabytes of fansubbed anime on it, and which I can now ping, and that’s about it.
One Linux box which was working fine right up until I tried to do a backup, whereupon it developed a severe case of FRUDS.*
One Windows box which will not boot, apparently, from anything.
One Windows notebook which is just about capable of playing a round of Minesweeper between reboots. If you choose the smallest game area.

Yep, that sounds like Windows. DVD misreads and power failures should not cause the ENTIRE system to be as fucked up as a terminal crack ho. Of course, in fairness, what caused the fubar on the misread DVD was that Dr.H turned the power off in an effort to break XP out of a hard lock. You know, the more I see of XP, the less I like it. I run on Win2k, and I don’t give a damn about Microsoft not supporting it anymore; as long as programs are still written that will run on it, I’m happy as I am. Ever wonder why there are no “user mods” out there? I suspect it’s because Microsoft would sue them till they bled white, but it’s really a damn shame that none of the crackers out there want to put their so-called brain power into actually improving the system instead of breaking it.

Related Note: Friday night, I was hanging out at Skirmishers, getting my new Dragonstorm deck run over by Control decks, and the shop owner’s husband showed me his Linux desktop, which runs Office 2003 (with some minor glitches) and Office 97 like it was written for it. So he says. Although he got the laptop out, I didn’t have time to play with it between rounds and see for myself.

I wonder if the learning curve is worth it, especially since I’d have to give up a lot of games and such. Does anyone have any knowledge of how the major A/V players are with Linux? Giving up the animé also is asking too much!