It had to happen. Approximately 18 months after building my PC, the goddamn thing stopped booting into MicroCrap XP Professional. No real idea why. It was an intermittent fault but became increasingly regular until it happened every time; the boot sequence showed the XP splash logo, then a black screen with a (movable) mouse pointer, but nothing else. Possibly a hardware fault? I checked all the connections, but MEPIS Linux loads fine, so it's a weird hardware fault if so. After eventually finding my XP Pro CD I fiddled around with the recovery console, thinking I might be able to repair the installation; before I knew it my C: drive had become E: and I was downloading 73 security updates from MicroCrap central. Seems to take most of the day, even with broadband. On the plus side, at least it boots up now OK.
Could have been a lot worse though... I could have been running Vista. If you read nothing else this year, do read 'A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection' by Peter Gutmann of Auckland University. If you haven't got time to read it all, here's the "executive executive summary":
The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.
Vista has the rare distinction of being the first operating system in history to do less things, less well, than its immediate predecessor. One could call it the Gerald Ford of operating systems; except Vista can't walk or chew gum at the same time. It's an absolute dog's breakfast, and the fact that thousands of copies of it are being sold every week gives the lie to the notion that capitalism is in any sense an optimally efficient economic system. It is doubtful that anyone would voluntarily shell out on Vista were they not forced to by Microcrap's machiavellian licensing policies. It'll certainly help both Linux and Macintosh gain market share although either of them have a mountain to climb if they are to displace Microsoft as the market leader. Still, one can but hope.
For my part, when the current PC finally dies, it'll almost certainly be a Linux machine I replace it with. I'm through with the MS bullshit.
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