So, as most of those who know could have guessed, I’ve become the computer fix-it guy over here. Between our firewalls, proxies and lack of reliable phones, troubleshooting is made difficult. The past week, I have had to fix four computers. That makes nine complete format and OS reinstalls. Of those, all nine had Windows Vista installed. I’m not a Vista guru but it seems to me that Vista was rushed to market. In every case, the only resort available was to upgrade them to XP. I say upgrade because the stability and performance after moving them to XP was remarkable. Every Marine was glad to have the reboots snappy and system stable. Most of them just figured the slowness of their computers was due to the laptop and not due to the bloated operating system Microsoft released.
Only one of them I was able to salvage. I found a nice little hack to reset any users password using Linux and some intuitive programming. This is definitely one of those “must have”‘s for the toolbox. The funny thing was, once I restored the Marine’s password, he asked if I could put XP on his laptop just because Vista was so annoying, bloated and slow.
I was also reading a story on how RedHat plans to capitalize on Microsoft’s release of Vista and the slowdown in the economy. I guess both of these type of events have, historically, led to the adoption of alternative software and operating systems. I really hope so. It would be nice to see some more competition out there. Mac has made a nice stand recently with their products. I guess we will see.
For me, I look forward to the late November release of Fedora 10. I’m going to be building up a new computer based on the “Ultimate Budget Box” on Ars Technica’s website. Sub-$500 isn’t bad for a full system with speakers, LCD monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. Plus, it only pulls 90 watts which will help with the electricity bill.
Anyway, I guess this is all wishful thinking.