Out comes my Knoppix 5 DVD, and into the machine I feed it. The local ntfs partition is mounted automagically. I mount my network samba share. Copy between the two… All my “stuff” which needs backing up before this machine can be memory wiped in a way that would make the creaters of the show Alias green with envy! Ok, so, not really… but still…
After that I’m gonna use the system restore to put the thing back together with some semblance of speed. And only then do I get to face the music: Hours and hours and hours of installing updates and software, and updates to software installed after updated to the system, and so on and so forth… and antivirus install, and antispyware install, and anti-windows install… or, I wish anyways.
And of course speed is “faster than as slow as it could be” because the bulk of the time is going to be spent in updates and copying my data back… the actual process of restoring the pc will be a minute amount of time compared to all of that…
And people wonder why I’ve switched to Mac OSX for my primary desktop!!
So, click on the wrong thing on accident and *POOF* your windows XP machine goes totally wonky. Major haywire. SNAFU to say the least. even with spybot’s teatimer and antivirus SW installed and updated. hundreds of registry access requests, and hundreds of stupid little exe processes launch. even with denying everything as quick as possible via teatimer something got through… and right now teatimer is fighting an automated war with some process which is trying to change my OS shell (presumably to install more spyware)… thousands of automatic deny notifications… I cant get to the process doing this in any normal way because “The system administrator has disabled access to the task manager”
?
The hell I have. So I do the obligatory update of adaware and spybot, reboot into safe mode (that’ll fix the little buggers, right?) well after manually setting permissions on locked portions of the registry both apps pronounce my system clean
wrong
reboot and the entire process starts all over again. I finally get the thing “clean” (quotes because it was STABLE not clean… like saying someone who’s got hepatitis is clean because there arent any symptoms today) So this morning I need to test a UI in IE. And WHAM
World War 3
I think to myself “here we go again” and I stop. I’m not going to clean this thnig… the sad truth of the matter is that windows xp is such a vulnerable piece of garbage that it will literally be both easier, and take less time (!) to copy all my 100GB of stuff needing to be saved off onto a samba share, and wipe and reload… And thats counting reinstalling all my apps and drivers, etc! Truly a sad thing to have to say about your OS (easier to just trash the thing than fix it?! GO MICROSOFT!)
WOW! I’m 17 again at a LAN gaming party preforming the nights obligatory “system nuke” (there was always one wasnt there?!)
so, who wants to argue TCO today?