Introduction

I came to work to see this message today on my chat box.

(18:57:05) Coworker A: If you get a chance, could you look at my son’s computer down here?
Coworker B got it a little acceptable a few months ago.
He is a sophomore at School A and will be starting summer school soon.
The computer has that stupid Vista which blue screens all the time.
Coworker B said for him to list down the codes when it blue screens. He did.
Can you check it out and see if it can be fixed or if I need to buy him a new computer?

DO YOU NEED WINDOWS?

The comfort zone

I was a windows user for ten years.
I went to work at an IT firm, I was doing graphic design and some web stuff at the time.
The shop had some real coding going on as well, none that I was a part of.
The coders were all using posix machines- linux, solaris, etc.

I noticed their s**t didn’t stink. That is, the machines did not crash.
I wanted that in my life. I knew windows and I knew it well. Well enough to know there is no
such thing as a stable windows box.

Moving to linux meant no more adobe photoshop. No more ms office stuite, no more video games-
not really. No more macromedia flash development. (No more guis really.. But at the time I had
no idea.. Simply suggesting to me that I have to ‘click’ on something tells me the software
is a piece of s**t)
It meant my box was going to stop being a cesspool of viruses, cracked video games, illegal
martian ballpoint sex porn. It meant my machine wwas going to be used for one thing and one
thing only: work.

I bit the fucking bullet. It took me a year to get comfy, and it worked.
I have no more problems with my operating system. I don’t lose data anymore.
I don’t have crashes.

Why the comfort zone is not comfortable

As I said, it took me a year to get used to linux, to another operating system.
But what I can do today, my ability as a worker- man and machines- is an order of magnitude
deeper than anything it could have been otherwise.
I would still be stuck picking my nose and wondering where my excel spreadsheet went.
Hoping that the ms word file I got sent via email will open up in my computer.

Windows is an evolutionary dead end

The operating systems are getting worse. It’s costing more and more- for software, for
maintenance, for repairs that shoudn’t even need to be made.

Linux used to be harder to use than windows. To learn, to install. Yes.
Maybe two years ago that started changing.
Today, it is harder to use windows than to learn and use linux or mac os.

If you continue to use windows computers, you will have more and more problems.
Your old data will not be accessible in a few years.
You will lose your children.
You will be raped.
You will die.

Windows alternatives

Mac

This will cost money. This will work. Mac is a great machine.
Mac will work well, there is a learning curve associated.
This is a safe choice. It’s expensive.

Linux

This is what I use.
Now, if you go online and search for download linux, you will be overwhelmed with
the choices.
There’s fifty different names like Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, etc etc etc.
These are all what we call ‘distributions’.
That means that it’s linux, plus some stuff such as a gui (the mouse, the icons, the things
you think are the computer). They all run linux.
Try Ubuntu, I hear people are very happy with it.

time: 12 horus

You will need to read up on intalling linux.
Don’t install over your old hard drive, buy a new one.
Download your distribution of choice, burn to cd or dvd..

time: 15 minutes

Install.

IF YOU STILL NEED WINDOWS

Use a secondary drive to store all your base

If you have a workstation (a box you can open, without a screen, a monitor and keyboard plug in ),
keep all your personal data in a secodary hard drive.
This is good practice in general.

This will allow you to simply throw the primary drive in the trash in case your system becomes
unusable. And using windows, it will.

time: 15 minutes

Go to BestBuy or whatever black market hardware source you have and dish out the
$60 for a new hard drive.
Ebay is a good choice also, Amazon.com as well.
Don’t buy the largest drive you can afford, or the cheapest.
Buy a known brand, Seagate, Western Digital.
Don’t buy a strange drive, such as a solid state “ssd” drive.

time: 60 minutes

Become educated acquainted about hard drives.

time: 35 minutes

Open your machine, install a secondary drive, also known as a slave drive.
You will have to refernce back to google to read up on
‘installing a slave drive into my workstation’.

time: 20 minutes

Boot up, go to ‘your computer’, find where the ‘c’ drive is, you should see another hard drive
icon with another letter. This drive will likely need to be formatted.

time: 40 minutes

Read up on ‘formatting a slave drive on windows’.
Format the drive.
Move your data. Stop saving any data to the old drive (c drive, ‘your’ desktop, etc).

Now, next time you get the blue screen, next time your windows software blows up and eats your
baby, all your data is “safe”.

You can simply buy a new hard drive, and install windows into ‘it’, keeping the slave drive
with all your stuff where it is.

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