I’m mourning the passing of electronic innocence.
Not too long ago my daughters got their own PCs, as I was fed up of them hogging mine. I still find them on my PC on a regular basis – reason being that their PCs are too slow, particularly to start up.
As it happens, one of said daughters is off for an overnight stay in Ireland with her mum this weekend, so, ever the thoughtful father, I said ‘don’t worry, while you’re away, I’ll get it speeded up.’
My plan was simple. This PC came with Vista installed, and my suspicion was that with the less fat-bulging XP it would run faster. She had no precious data on the hard disk, so I was going to reformat it and pop a (legitimate) copy of XP I had hanging around on it.
Much muttering later and I gave up. Now it’s not that I’m new to this game. At one point, when I reviewed software for a living, my PC used to get so clogged up with programs I used to start from scratch every few months. It was dead simple. Boot from a boot disk, format the hard disk, re-install Windows, the drivers and any updates and you had a sparkly fast computer.
But (not helped by not having a floppy drive) I simply couldn’t budge Vista. My XP setup went straight to a blue screen of death, while a WIndows 98 disk (yes, I really was desperate) wouldn’t even recognize the CD drive it had booted from. And so on.
It wasn’t a totally hopeless mission. I still managed to speed the thing up significantly by removing a lot of trash that was loading on startup. But it was frustrating.
Just as cars have gone from a 2CV, designed to be fixable by any blacksmith, to a modern vehicle that can’t be touched with electronic diagnostics, the once open playground of the PC has now stopped being so user accessible. Just as the operating system has become more like the Mac in appearance (a good thing) the system has become more closed like Apple’s always was. It probably makes sense if you never want to change anything – and I’m sure that’s 90% of users – but it’s still a sad demise of my electronic innocence.
Let me save you form the darkness, my brother of electronic trenches!...
That’s the one reason Linux became so important in my life. I was born in 1981, together with the IBM PC. I had micros in my house ever since. First some Z80 machines, then IBM’s ATs and XTs… I was there the day that people started to put the call to “win.exe” in their autoexec.bat files, something that gave me the creeps.
I was there when windows 95 came too… And 98. Then I stated to feel like you are saying! Things stopped to make sense. Nothing worked the way we expected them to work. You can’t figure out what is wrong…
Windows became more and more closed, as Apple used to be!... But see, Apple is nowdays making a little (just a very little) effort in going the other way, starting to adopt some free software in their systems.
When I switched over to the Linux world (I actually started out with BSD), it was regaining my freedom. Things start to make sense again. You try out things, fiddling with some obscure configuration files, and then they work!... You can watch the guts of the system, and you can operate on them anytime you want!
Try it out, it might be just what you need. And the graphical interfaces can be even nicer then MS’s or Apple’s. Plus, Linux is a must for old slow machines, tough of course you should see it in a good machine too, not to get a bad impression of it.
My preferred distribution is debian , but there are others more directed to easily-scarable people, like ubuntu . You should also try one of those “live-CD” distros, that you can boot up from a CD. I like knoppix very much. Check it out right now!
Nicolau –
Much appreciated. I must admit, I just knew someone would say ‘use Linux’. Back in my software days I have used Linux and other Unixes – but I’m not sure it’s the answer here.
The problem’s the applications. I couldn’t work without OneNote/Word/Excel/Access/MindManager (particularly OneNote). As for my daughter, unless there are Linux versions of Sims2 and DesignYourOwnHairStyle (or some such), she’s not convertible.
There’s also the minor matter of ever getting the machine to boot from anything other than Vista, but that’s a different issue.
... but I do (I really do) appreciate the joy of Linux.
I know what you mean about Apple being a bit more open on the software front, but they still don’t encourage you to fiddle around inside the box. And, as iPhone users have found to their cost, they’re still up to naughty tricks when it comes to killing stuff if you dare to fiddle with their software.