I'll never say another bad word about...
Windows.
I got a very nice new laptop yesterday, I really like it. Being the Geek that I am I decided it would be even better running Ubuntu. I’d even done a dry run on my old laptop and things were looking good.
Yesterday I shoved the live CD in the drive and off it went. Ubuntu looked great, ran great, but sounded rubbish - it just didn’t want to install the soundcard. “That’s ok” I thought, it’s mostly for webdesign anyway and as I work with Ubuntu more I’ll get the hang of solving little glitches like this and it’ll just add new badges to my Geekness.
I was setting up Macromedia Fireworks to run in wine, and due to some oddities it needs to be copied over from a Windows installation. I’d already installed it before I installed Ubuntu, so things were going fine.
It was the final step of the process that requires the registry entries to be copied over where things went wrong. I booted into Windows, which had happily been hibernating. ACK, RFGDEEDDDR BLEEEEP was about as far as it got as it carelessly tried to access areas of disk that just weren’t there anymore.
“Oops” I thought. “Oh well, it’ll just make the switch over to Linux all the more final”.
So I happily continued, deciding to sort that pesky soundcard next. Downloaded the drivers from the manufacturer’s website, ran the install: “Can’t find something important, you’re an idiot” was what I got. “No matter”, thought I, bravely plowing on. I’ll sort that next, quick reboot and things will be ok. “Can’t find that thing that you uninstalled just before failing to install the next one”. Oh.
So I’d broken Windows AND I’d broken Linux. Go Me.
I tried a few things to recover my X thingy. No good, just broke it more.
So there I sat for the 3-odd hours feeding Windows recovery CDs into the CD drive and everything is as good as new! Brilliant!
Say what you like about Windows, but at the end of the day, it does just work.
I’m looking forward to my free Vista upgrade to arrive now ;)