Windows? Not so much....

I won't say I've ever been a rabid fan-boy of Microsoft's, but I will say I've always preferred their OS to others. This probably has a lot to do with what I'm used to using, and the fact that I'm basically lazy coupled with my job, which is to support sed software.

I do believe that may be changing.

A little story before I get into what's going on.

My very first foray into the world of computers was actually on a Mac II. I was a college student going to a big university. I couldn't afford my own computer, so I had to use what was in the "computer lab". The only things sitting in this so called lab were Mac II's. So, I spent many nights hammering out papers (and losing them - freakin' lab was constantly losing power). While I like the little Macs, I knew I could never afford one. Let's face it, in the 80's, cars were cheaper.

My second foray was in engineering classes. In those days, they didn't expect anyone to know anything about computers, so about half of your freshman year was to get you up-to-speed on computing in general, and mainframes in specific. Our particular brand at this university was VAX. Now Fortran and I did NOT get along well. I was so spectacularly bad at it, I crashed the VAX system. This astounded so many people I was accused of being a hacker by the sysadmins until my professor stood up for me (sort of) and told them I was a complete idiot who was failing his class.

Since my first two forays were less than positive, it was a while before I tried again, and really I was snuck up on by the next. My mother brought home an IBM PC. This large, non-descript beige box sat intimidatingly upon our kitchen counter. The fans were so loud on this beast (yeah, a big 286) that it basically screamed whenever it was powered on. The thing that really impressed me about it was how incredibly over-engineered it was. Hardware-wise, IBM really knew how to put together a case. I've seen tanks with less metal on them. And the OS wasn't as slick as Apples, but man, was it easy to figure out. It beat the VAX system by a mile, as you can imagine it would to a complete novice. Pretty soon, I was playing a text-based D&D clone, writing papers, and surfing the local BBS'. I was sold. Windows was it.

So, ever since, I've been a Windows "fan". I am not a Microsoft apologist, nor have I ever been one. I have given them the benefit of the doubt and suggested others do so as well. I am not one of those Windows-centrists that hates or poo-poo's other OS'. I always admired the Apple OS' (and later, slick case designs starting with the G3), but could never afford one. So I stuck it out with Windows.

I've used every generation of Windows since 3.1. I hated 95 because it was glitchy as hell, but it sure made gaming easier. I loved 98 (particularly SE) in spite of its glitches. By that point, I knew how to either fix them or get around them. I liked NT for the most part because it mostly made my life easier and was relatively easy to fix. I adored 2000 because it offered all the usability and friendliness of 98 with better stability of NT. We won't discuss ME (I'm still in denial over that piece of crap). I worshipped XP, especially when SP2 released (probably still their best desktop OS). I really liked Vista, even. I have it loaded on my laptop even now, but I've got to tell you, it's really lost its luster.

I've been afraid of Linux for quite a while. It's probably a pathological condition (or conditioning, if you believe some websites), but mostly it's probably sheer laziness. Why bother switching OS' when the one I have works perfectly well, especially since I'll have to learn this whole new set of commands and bugs and everything!?!

Well, I'll tell you what has changed my mind.

I have a laptop with a 60Gb hard drive (I know, don't bug me, it's fine). For me, that should be enough space for years. I only run web apps, MS Office, and World of Warcraft on this machine. I only need it for school and entertainment in other words. As I said before, this thing runs Vista (Business, to be specific). While WoW is a monster hog of a program, this should still leave tons of room. I re-imaged this laptop about a month-and-a-half ago. When I finished, it had about 60% of the hard drive free. OK, no problem.

This last weekend, I took a quick peek at the hard drive in preparation for running defrag (I like to do it about 1/month), and what do my eyes behold? I'm down to less than 25% free space! WTF!?!?

A little poking around reveals the problem. I left Windows updates on and wide open. Freakin' Windows downloaded the Library of Congress with every update imaginable. It installed Internet Explorer 8 against my express wishes (the one thing I told it NOT to do). It took restore points every few minutes (slight exageration), and it's freakin' index services decided to build a database that was huuuuuuuuge. It was at this point I decided that enough was enough.

I backed up everything near and dear to my heart and I went through the computer with a sledgehammer. I removed all the manufacturer's crap-ware. I killed the system restore (because I know how to fix the freakin' thing, thank you very much!), I killed indexing, and I removed any update from Microsoft that wasn't absolutely critical. I could've rebuilt it from scratch, but I'd be going through this again another month from now. Once I completed this major work, I went shopping.

Hitting the internet, I went looking for Linux. I read the reviews, I read the tech sites, I read everything I could on what this thing was and how can I learn to use it.

I settled on Ubuntu, made myself an install on a USB drive, and went to work.

Two days later, I'm able to do everything but run one program that I want on the system (Ventrillo), but I'm sure I'll figure it out shortly. WoW runs smoother than it EVER did on Windows. My laptop, since the first time I owned it, feels sveldt and light on its feet. Everything seems to work better.

I was concerned at first about my Office 2007 docs, but that has turned out to be a complete non-issue. Open Office and I are getting along just fine, thank you very much!

And you know what the best part of the whole thing is for me? If something breaks, I don't have to deal with the freakin' Bing search engine in the futile effort to find a solution. I can drive this bitch from under the hood. Loves me some CTRL+ALT+F1.

I still have a Windows partition on my machine, but I suspect it's about to go the way of the dinosaurs.