Clowns In My Coffee

I’ve never had a smooth Windows installation experience. Before this whole thing started, the machine was stuck with a wireless card that had no WPA support and dropped connections for no reason at all. The flaky driver was just this side of completely unacceptable, but I broke out the trowel and mortar when the hard drive started going south. I got a new hard drive and let it sit around for a week or two while I steeled myself for the migration; I am fairly cavalier and confident when it comes to migrating my own data, because I’m willing to put up with a fair amount of pain, stashing it here, there, and everywhere while I work out the occasional kinks. This, however, was not my data I was migrating, and I don’t want to inflict unnecessary pain on my favouritest tech-support client.

It probably doesn’t help that I tend not to use Windows all that often. I keep it around for games, of course, and on the off-chance I’ll try to write anything more than a non-trivial C# application. How smooth a Windows installation goes depends on which version you’re trying to install and how many updates are needed to bring it up to date. The last time it was successful, I think it took about eight reboots in between all the updates and driver installations. This time, I couldn’t even get the machine to boot after the initial installation. In a fit of pique, I nabbed an Ubuntu image, burned it, and about 10 minutes after that, I had an operating system running. Partly I did that to establish that I hadn’t somehow messed up the installation of the new hard drive, but after I got it going, I thought, “hey, why not go all the way with this?”

Granted, it took significantly more work to get the Broadcom-based wireless card to work with Ubuntu, but that’s more a function of Broadcom’s attitude towards Linux support — the Ubuntu forums have a Broadcom How-To that put me over the top. At any rate, I recall the inital installation of the card under Windows was beastly too. Let that be a lesson: do your research, don’t just buy the second-cheapest thing at the big-box store =)
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve managed to extract the backed up files (since I’d done a Windows backup, this involved finding a utility MS provides but for which they do not offer support, and of course that involved hours of search-engine and tinkering). Just a little while ago, I migrated the Firefox and Mozilla profiles over, along with all the photos and the documents — you know, the important stuff.

So, this house … is a Linux house (mostly). Of course, what with the state’s tax-free weekend coming up, I’m seriously considering getting a Mac. Because, you know, you can’t have too many computers. What remains to be seen is whether my deep distrust of Apple’s cult of DRM, secrecy, and spotty track record with standards support overcomes my infatuation with shiny objects whose major stats are measured in large numbers of units called “flops.”