Singing the PC Blues

Last week my PC coughed and choked and damned near came to an unceremonious end. It's only the bazzillionth time that it has locked up, and I had no other choice than to do a forced shutdown (hold in the power button until the thing turns off). This drives me insane. Doing this kind of thing is tantamount to playing Russian Roulette with the operation system. I mean, this is Windoze. Windoze sucks rotten eggs because it can get screwed up badly in an infinite number of ways, every one of which is extremely likely given the right user-incantation or mistake.




Yes, I know. I'm ranting. Windoze does that to me. The very idea that this OS has spread - like a virus - is so appropos. I understand how it happened, I was there from the beginning. I worked on the IBM PC with it's ground-breaking 8-bit MS-DOS. I worked on the Osborne. I saw Windoze take over the known universe. And, I understand why the OS is the way it is today. It doesn't lessen my angst and incredulity.




The Microsoft Operating System is a lesson in Marketing and the establishment that a ground-floor customer base in the business of offices (remember, it all started as an IBM Personal Computer - which pushed the old IBM Selectric into the dank and dusty basement of every business in the US inside of 10 years).




Speaking of IBM, what about Apple? Did you know that MacOS X is now based on the Unix operating system? This is a giant leap forward for the personal computer industry. Unix is overwhelmingly the best OS now available to common folk. MacOS is interlaced into the unix and it operates flawlessly. Unfortunately, the dichotomy between PC and Mac has grown too disparate over the last 20 years. They now occupy such diverse niches, that I fear that we'll never rid ourselves of Windoze Mass Proliferation (don't tell Bush - he might send some troops in to obliterate businesses everywhere). It has become the defacto OS for the vast majority of home and business users.




Alas, I am not a Mac user. While I admire the engineering, it does not give me the options of the Windoze world that marketing and open source has opened up. Applications will always be sparse for MacOS, comparatively speaking. The knowledgebase is not as far-reaching. And the #1 reason I do not buy Macs is they are incredibly expensive for what you get, and difficult to add hardware due to the lack of MacOS X device drivers for some peripheral devices.



So, last week when my six year old Pentium PC running Windoze locked up for the umpteenth time, I knew it was time to bite the bullet before it became burnt toast, and to find a new PC.




So, we went to Fry's Electronics. They happened to be selling of a recently discontinued system called the FM8140 - it's a Fry's built PC - not manufactured by HP or Compaq, or anyone else. Been there, bought two of those. This system has a dual-core AMD processor each of which is 2.2GHz (if I remember correctly...), and 2GB of RAM, high-end graphics and audio. I'm pretty happy with it - for the most part. It has stoopid Windoze XP Media Center, but as I said, I can live with it. It cost about a 2/3 less than the original asking price, because of its discontinued status.




So, now my evenings are spent tweaking the new system and transferring all the accumulated stuff (that I need to keep) from the old one. Not sure what I will do with the old system. I suspect I'll see if I can't recondition it and make it into the house web server... or something.
We'll see. Maybe I'll get a new motherboard (if I can find one to fit the box), and go from there. Put on Linux. Install a database and web server...




Should be fun! Heh-heh.