Rants...

This is basically a place for me to unload without it being tossed up to the front page for each post. Newest items at the top, obviously.

4/18/12 00:24

Fucking Old Computers...

Now listen. I like old computers, and I like Linux. The two can go hand in hand with little to no troubles. And for that reason, I will keep a good running computer around longer than most. But if you really need a computer so bad that you pulled it out of the back corner of a storage building and it hasn't seen the light of fucking day in over a decade, do not ask me to put mother-fucking Windows XP on it.

I know XP was the most popular and longest running version of Windows and 99% of the Western world is intimately familiar with it. But that is no god damn reason to pull a fucking Dell Optiplex from 2000 out of storage just to set it up as a web browser.

It really is a pain in my fucking ass. I have to find drivers, check. Put drivers on thumbdrive, check. Install windows. Format a 19GB HDD that has disk warnings all over it and so takes about 2.5 hours, check. Install Windows, 45 minutes later, check. Insert thumbdrive, check. Get drivers, shit. This thing has USB, that is USB1.0 folks patched to 2.0, but not yet. So my damn thumbdrive doesn't work. Burn 7MB of drivers onto the only other disposable media I have, a DVDROM, check. Insert DVD, shit. DVD is corrupt. Take two, check. Insert DVD, shit!! ANOTHER FUCKING CORRUPT DVD AREYOUFUCKINGKIDDINGME?!??! Smoke a cigarette in order to try and thin my blood enough with nicotine that this vein in my forehead doesn't pop spraying desk and several computers with arterial blood, check.

It is now almost 1AM, and I have to sleep. The customer will be told tomorrow that the HDD is on it's last leg, but I will try SpinRite on it to see if can bring it back, adding at least another day to allow me to burn stupid CDs, or for fuck's sake DVDs.

Now If I wanted to put Linux on this POS, it would actually stop being a POS and could have been running within about the first 20 minutes. Granted the HDD is still screwed, but running SpinRite and then maybe having to reinstall Linux is still another 20 minutes. Not the three hour loss I am eating now.

Oh well.

<edit 4/18/12 16:44>
I actually saved myself the trouble and told the client that it will cost more to fix the PC than it will to buy a new one. Anything off the shelf is going to be better than this old POS.