Wednesday, January 9, 2013

My Victory Over Windows XP - Let Me Show You It.

Eight years.

Eight years of viral paranoia ... eight years of watching that lying motherfucking progress bar crawling - or just as often, straight-up frozen like a bloody mammoth in a glacier ... eight years of molasses-velocity boot-ups & command response ... eight years of knowing that I paid WAAAAAAAAAY too much for teh warez in my otherwise adequate Acer.

Four years of giving up in total humiliation & just ignoring it completely in favour of a new model once it became so unreliable & torpid that it was a ticket to more pain than utility every time I powered it up. But it still sat there the whole time, mocking me with its utter uselessness, like a scoreboard reading "Computer-1, Human-0."

Can't bear to use Apple software - I know it's sexy stuff but I find it both painfully abstruse & much too cute for its own good - so I guess I just have to grin & bear it ... I mean, you can't fight City Hall Microsoft, right?

WRONG.


Happiness Is A Warm Pangolin.

I may be a dipshit when it comes to computers, but I'm nothing if not a stubborn one: after numerous failures, today I finally got the poor old critter to install 12.04 LTS without a hitch. It's running now even as I type.


Ridiculous Snoopy-Dance Of Joyful Triumph: ACTIVATE!

FEELS GOOOOOOOD MAN.

6 comments:

Hamish Mack said...

Alright jim!!! A blow for freedom.

jim said...

Oh, it's still got a little residual trolling left to inflict ... I have a wee "firmware missing" issue to deal with before the persnickety ol' mule will haul any wireless.

But this is why I went out today & got a rare poverty-pack of IPAs - two big-ass computer projects on my days off ... & I'm two for two for a bloody change! Victory makes the beer go down oh so much more sweetly.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF STEVE BALLMER.

mikey said...

YAY!

If you're struggling with that pesky Dell/Broadcom WiFi driver issue, it can be a pain in the ass, alright. I've got Ubuntu on a couple of Dells. Don't despair - the driver is actually hidden the distro .iso file. Let me know if you continue to have trouble and I'll send you the details...

jim said...

Awww mikey, ya big lug ... that's so sweet.

Heh. If the workaround I Interwebbed up the other day chumps it I might actually take yez up on that, now that you mention it.

jim said...

Solved!

Couldn't relocate the big complicated solution - but found a quick easy one instead: just got "nonfree-firmware" from the Software Centre, & now the old jalopy hoovers up Le Wireless smooth as silk.

jim said...

Soooooo ... when I struck my mighty blow at the archfiend Xp, I actually didn't kill it. I just changed over to a dual-boot of Precise Pangolin after the original USB (with Kubuntu instead) threatened to nuke/replace the existing system. I presumed (happily in error) that I'd need the vile beast to help with something later.

Thus, as of today I've reverted to "Plan A" - the Kubuntu 12.04 stick has been extracted & having now restarted as a virgin install, as of 10:36 local siderial time, SHIT IS OFFICIALLY BECOMING ENTIRELY R3AL.

(brb, jiggling electrons)