I knew I shouldn’t have done it.

But of course I did.

The other night I was whacked after hospital visits and the like and had poured myself a few fingers of whiskey. I blame the latter in my defence.

Anyhows it crossed my mind to have a look at a game which I hadn’t played in years. One of the reasons I had left it all those years ago was that it only ran in Windows. There is a sort of fifth rate version in Linux which lacks the sound, graphics and general realism so I haven’t looked at that in years either. I’m not really one for games anway.

I should point out at this stage that I have three operating systems on my laptop – Linux Mint, Ubuntu and Windows 7 and I select my choice in a little menu that pops up when I switch on.

So anyways, I booted into Windows. Big mistake!! I’m not quite sure what happened but it fucked itself up. I should have left things there but of course I didn’t! Again I blame the whiskey.

Off I went looking for my windows 7 DVD but of course I couldn’t find it. I had probably chucked it out during my clean up of the Back Room. I did however find a Windows 8.1 and a copy of Windows 10. It was a toss up. I had tried the latest 10 in a Linux virtual machine and it didn’t seem to be quite as bad as I remembered I thought in a moment of drunken foolishness that I may as well install 10.

Hah!

I tried numerous ways of burning 10 onto a DVD [wouldn’t work for love nor money] and eventually managed to burn it onto a USB stick.

I tried booting into the USB stick and it kept failing. Fuck! The laptop was now rightly fucked up. In desperation I installed Windows 8.1.

I went through the selections. It asked for my version and gave me a choice of only one [English US]. It asked for my time and currency preferences. I went down the list and there was Irish [English would get the time right but the wrong currency] and finally it asked for my keyboard preference. I selected Irish as that is what I have. Incidentally, Linux detects where I am and sets all this up automatically but then that’s Linux.

I spent a happy couple of hours watching little balls chase themselves in circles. The time came to boot into Windows 8.

The first thing that happened was that I was presented with a choice of Windows 7 and about four versions of Windows 10 along with Windows 8. No sign of Linux of course as nothing apparently exists outside the Microsoft bubble. I chose 8.

Up popped a screen in fucking Irish! Now I have every respect for the language and can even speak cúpla focal but frankly was put off for life by the doom and gloom of Peig Sayers. I honestly don’t blame the population of the Blaskets for migrating to the mainland if only to get away from Peig. [Irish readers will know what I’m on about]. I eventually discovered that I had to actually download what Microsoft calls ‘English (Irish)’.

Now Windows 8 is an abomination and even 10 is an improvement. I found a way to burn a USB that would work in Windows but my problem now was that my copy of 10 was now cut off in Linux. I had to reinstall Linux just to recreate the menu [a simple job] and get into Linux to retrieve the file. I copied it over to the Windows area and rebooted back into Windows 8. I then burned the file onto a USB.

I booted into the USB and installed Windows 10. It took several attempts because I had gone off to do something else and Windows got into a loop – it kept rebooting as part of the install and of course kept reloading the USB version instead of the newly installed one. Jayzus but Microsoft is a pain in the hole! So I was forced to start from scratch and had to watch the entire process, whipping out the USB during the reboot.

I got Windows 10 to work properly and even got it to set the correct language. It still offers me a choice of 7 or 10 at start up but I can live with that. I set it to not connect to the Interweb so at least I needn’t worry about viruses or hundreds of irritating updates.

All I had to do then was one more reinstall of Linux just to get my boot screen to work.

That took about ten minutes.

If Tobacco Control really want to discover why so many people die young, they should just research how many of those unfortunates used Windows.

I reckon it has shaved ten years off my lifespan.

Maybe Windows causes cancer too?