Wednesday, October 5th, 2005, 7:44 am
Windows Dies Again
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HIS morning I received a flash reminder of how disasterous Windows can be. I tend to forget this as my professional life is Microsoft-free. My mother’s computer refuses to boot as the hard-drive cannot be mounted by Windows XP. Not even safe mode can do the trick.
This comes at a time when I strongly urge my mother to switch to Linux (probably Ubuntu), which perhaps would be a blessing as the computer reached a halt (over 5 minutes to boot) due to Registry bloat. Perhaps this O/S crash will wind up serving us well, but the amount of distress and required restoration work is enormous. This all comes at a time when we are reminded how mature Linux has truly become.
“Why choose Ubuntu for the parents?”, one might ask. I have 3 Linux machines at Manchester and 2 of them (the more recently set up) run Ubuntu while the main one (repository or so-called ‘mother ship’) runs SuSE, which is my favourite.
While I’m here at home I occasionally the Ubuntu Live CD because, let us face it, it can be a pain working under Windows as you cannot (trivially) SSH with X forwarding. Only the bandwidth is somewhat of a barrier at the moment (ADSL as opposed to proper LAN).
