Never volunteer
“Grandad?” says Granddaughter the Elder.
“Yes Pet?”
“Can you do something for me?”
“That depends” says I. There is no way I am going to trap myself into lending her a couple of hundred or giving her a lift to Donegal or something.
“Can you put Linux on this?” She opened her backpack and produced a laptop.
“I can” says I, “but why Linux?”
“My dad says it’s the best.”
“Where did he get that idea?” SiL is not known for making intelligent decisions.
“He said you told him.”
I was impressed. For once the little sod had actually listened to my advice. It’s a pity he didn’t listen to all the rest.
So Granddaughter the Elder skipped up to the attic to visit her Granny and I put Linux on the laptop. It was a second-hand machine and someone had completely wiped the hard disk so it was an easy job. It took me about twenty minutes to the point where it was working perfectly.
I showed it to G the E and she was delighted.
“Now I can load up all my games” says she in excitement.
Alarm bells rang.
“You can’t run your old programmes on Linux” says I.
I then said something incredibly foolish –
“Would you like me to put Windows on it as well?”
Of course she jumped at the idea and I said I would do it sometime when I had a chance.
So yesterday I got her laptop, wiped the hard disk and started to install Windows.
It failed.
It complained that it needed an extra DVD Driver to load the disk.
I searched the Interwebs and found some drivers. I installed them. It still complained. I searched the Interwebs again and discovered that it is a dud DVD I was using and fuck all to do with drivers. Thanks Bill Gates! You and your useless error messages. Cunt!
I burned a new DVD and that went well. I installed Windows.
I tried to connect to the Interweb on it. It couldn’t even detect that it has Wireless [Linux of course had done that straight away]. I spent the rest of the evening trying to find drivers but as yet haven’t found one.
So today, or sometime, I have to resume my search and probably spend days at it. And when I have that done I will probably have to install more software to get the machine fully functional. And then I have to go through all the fucking updates and installing anti-virus and all that crap.
Only then can I reinstall Linux.
That’ll only take about twenty minutes.
Linux Mint does all I need it to do. It even found the network printer and installed it’s own driver. Who needs a Window to the world when you have the whole world in front of you. Boo Windoze. Go Linux!
Dammit! Two fucking days and I finally got the machine to realise it had wireless.
Then there were all the fucking tweaks I had to do just to get it to run properly.
Actually installed Mint in 15 minutes [and most of that was background updating].
If you spent only 2 days getting windows wifi to work, that’s pretty good. Now try bluetooth!Don’t even dream that you can just restart the computer and boot into the other guy. No, you have to shutdown/power-off, wait 30 seconds or so then cold-boot into the other guy. And you still have to re-pair everything. As for windows updates, choose a time when you are very calm, almost comatose, and be prepared to turn into exploding lava when it reboots, to finish things off into … linux. Because of course they own the machine.
There needs to be a one stop shop click and there is is all loading up. Of course you have to have the internet connection blah, blah, blah. Emulators they call them.
I’m surprised at you. I installed countless Win/Linux dual boots, and in all different flavours of Linux…and minux and BSD and all the other Unix variants.First lesson I learned, from my Linuxing Betters and (usually) youngers (getting schooled by American 12 year olds was fun) was that Windows will not tolerate any Gods besides it. You Install windows first.Good, that was 15 years ago but I doubt that has changed.I am getting sooooo pissed off at how slow Windows is on this machine, when it should fly, that I am rapidly considering a dual boot.