Slowping's Journal: The Linux Threat

For a long list of reasons, my father uses a Windows machine for his home busines computer, which I got and set up for him. We got the system about a year ago, and I installed the Chinese version of Windows XP (yes it's legit). When it works, it works okay. Enough for my dad to use from day-to-day for his computing needs.

What's good is that he can read, write, and print Chinese, and explore the system by himself. But on the downside, WindowsXP (atleast the chinese version) has had a strange habbit of dying about once every three months or so.

And I mean totally die. I don't know what the problem is... sometimes it's a corrupted registry, bad pagefile, windows-update-gone-wrong-killing-the-installation, you name it..... And I know it's not the hardware. They've been tested, re-tested, and replaced multiple times. To be safe, I've even underclocked his gigahertz machine to make sure it never over-heats.

So here I was, spending about a whole day trying to recover this computer of his. The damn computer was set to auto-reboot whenever there's a kernel panic (or whatever they call it in Windows land). And since this latest problem actually prevented windows from fully starting, it would be stuck in a continuous cycle of rebooting!

Talk about lame! The system recovery disk didn't work and the "fix windows installation" option didn't work. Boy what I wouldn't have given for a bootable rescue disc with a shell and text readable configuration files. But I digress...

Anyways, that's when I decided to just re-install the damn machine. Luckily, we had a very recent backup of his data. This is when it gets REALLY frustrating.

Now, in an attempt to install over the old installation, the install process blue-screens half-way through. Even after doing the suggested changes from google, the install still crashes.

And so, I decided to wipe the drive and start over.
Same results.
Over and over again.... I tried every combination of BIOS settings and pulling out unnecessary hardware that I could think of.
And still the install crashes. This must've happened about a dozen times.

Finally, I decided that I would install RedHat 9 on it instead. I'd have to work a little harder to try and customize the box and re-educate my father on how to use the computer, but it'd be worth it to save myself from the current Winblows hell.

So, I put the WinXP disc in one last time, and got it installing... again... while I ran off to download and burn a set of RedHat discs.

Upon returning, with RedHat/GNU/Linux discs in hand, I saw, in amazement, WindowsXP installed (albeit barebones) and running on my dad's computer.

*sigh*