So, $62.99 USD and four days later and I’m finally back on my own PC.
A ran follows.
This has been a very frustrating experience, and that frustration goes beyond “just” buying a new hard drive. I’m going to have to call Microsoft tomorrow so that I can continue to use my own computer. Ironically, this is one of the reasons why I’m eventually ditching Windows and thus why I began reviewing Linux distros to begin with. Over these past few frustrating days I began to actually feel warm and fuzzy about Microsoft Windows, but they instantly change that with their insistence to control how I use my computer. Any further comment on that wouldn’t exactly be civilized but I am in no mood to put it politely, so, moving on..
As it stands I’m pretty sure that I’m through with Linux. I don’t want to have to replace any more of my hardware and the time (and now money) that it’s been costing me is simply not worth it. It looks like I will eventually move to an Apple Mac, but that day is still quite some time from now.
Yes, I do realize that the Mac is *nix distro… at least sort of.
When my system starts there is now about 15 seconds of black screen. From there it finally loads into the animated Windows XP boot screen. I have no idea what’s causing the blackness and this stall, but I’m simply glad that the system is even booting now. For some baffling reason the system was having issues with the RAM and wouldn’t boot at all. I used the D-Link diagnostics tool that came with my system to discover that this was the problem, but in order to use the D-Link tool I had to unplug those god awful little jumper wires. So of course I had to plug those back after I swapped the sticks of memory in their banks so that the computer would boot….
…and I am just tired of it all right now. Today I came the closest that I’ve come in a long time to just saying to heck with computers. They cost too much money, they take up too much time and, frankly, all that time and money could be spent so much more productively.
I won’t do that, of course. I’m too much of a computer nerd. There was that moment, though, when I wanted to walk away from it all.
There’s more to it than the side of me that’s a computer nerd; there are the close friends that I can remain in contact with only over the Internet. Quite frankly, they were the reason why I continued to bother with those stupid little wires to get this blasted thing working again at all.
Anyway, that ends this rant. Read the post on my personal blog to read a bit more about the situation. I’ll wait to write a full “what happened” post to SIM since I’d like to keep posts here more-or-less professional.
~Mysk, one very annoyed person