Well, my Windows 2K system died over the weekend. This was not too surprising, as it had been nearly a year since the last time it crashed, so it was certainly way overdue. Nevertheless, it was a blasted nuisance.
The precipitating incident seems to have been my decision to get the latest updates. Last Wednesday I downloaded and installed the first update that Microsoft recommended (the latest version of IE 6, a browser I practically never use), and immediately my system went into a seemingly never-ending cycle of reboot, crash with a cryptic error message at different points in the boot process, reboot, etc. The only nice thing about this was that it performed this little ritual with no input from me; I was able to just sit back and enjoy the show. Of course, "enjoy" is not the word I would use.
Eventually, the reboot cycle came to an end and the PC seemed to have stabilized. I decided not to install any more updates just then.
Anyway, Saturday morning the system just died. Blue Screen Of Death. Cryptic error message flying by way too fast for human eyes to read. Auto-reboot, etc. I let this go on for about 45 minutes before deciding that I was licked. It was time to reinstall...
...which is a long boring process. Suffice it to say that while I was reinstalling, I decided that this was it for Windows, and so I used my Mac to download the latest Red Hat Linux CD images. My plan is to migrate my last few Windows apps to my Mac, and sometime soon, perhaps this weekend, upgrade from Windows to Linux. At that time I'll have two Linux boxes, so I'll migrate my web server to the faster of the two.
Who knows. I may even find time to start regular blogging sometime soon.
Posted by jt at August 18, 2003 05:56 PM