i am here on windows now (in an unrelated idiot's guide to compiling issue) because i rolled the chair over the mandrake cd and because i am lazy but...
i recently won an auction on a as-is laptop from ebay
it came with windows 98 (at slooooow speed) and seemed to work fine for what i had planned for it: updating HTML code at customers places of residence.
one day, i turned it on and basically booted to a windoze BSOD.
neither enter nor ctrl-alt-del would elicit any kind of response, and just as i was ready to pull the plug, it hit me:
how long can one leave a BSOD be? what would happen?
so i left the fucker on. day after day it remained, taunting me to download the damned ISOs and make it work, but i let the inherant ms crash-code run its course.
in retrospect, it had not been worth the curiosity, nor was it worth the $15 plus shipping i spent on the generic POS, because now it looks like the hard drive is done for, maybe more
i came home for work and something magical had happenned. i was greeted by an ascii screen of never ending gobbledygook, line by line off into infinity.
wether this was caused by ms-code or terrible korean worksmanship (is there a difference?) is now a question for the ages, because i will not be spending a red cent on this pentium 1. the real issue is that if you leave home, trusting that windoze will skillfully manuver your server through any errors, is obviously fundamentally flawed.
just look at the year after year uptimes of linux and it occurs to you: using linux is like using good motor oil. use linux and your car may last 300,000 miles, NOT becaue it is good oil, but because god likes your intelligent choices. that is not to say that linux organizations dont make good motor oil (?)
ps: any suggestions as to why this laptop does POST, then begins displaying gobbledygook in a line-by-line under dos environment, even with a linux recovery floppy, would be great!
