A Big FU to Windows Advocates
Posted by voice | Filed under Rant, Techie
So yeah, I love how I constantly hear how Windows is superior to Linux because “it just works”. Well you know what, the past 5 hours or so I’ve found that to be a complete bold-faced lie. My sister got a Toshiba Satellite A215-S7422 laptop from BestBuy a while back and has spent that time dealing with Windows Vista Home Premium edition. First off, let me state how horrible the cooling is on this laptop, I installed speedfan because it felt like the laptop could cook an egg and I was proven right, Windows Vista just idling was making the laptop a toasty 81C, holy crap. My sister had asked repeatedly in the past if I could just remove Vista and install XP on it, and until recently I had refused because Windows as it is is a pain in the ass to install.
Eventually I cave in and tell her I’ll remove Vista from it, however she had also asked about installing Ubuntu, out of curiosity. I decided I’d go ahead and install Ubuntu because she doesn’t do PC gaming anyways and I figure if she doesn’t like it I can just install XP. Her laptop is running a AMD Turion64 X2 processor so my natural move is to grab the amd64 copy of Ubuntu 8.10. I had had problems in the past with the 64bit version of Ubuntu, mainly getting certian programs to run, but I was very surprised when I installed it, unlike the previous attempt on my Dell laptop this installed fairly quickly and with no problems. The next step most Linux users are familiar with is determining what works and what doesn’t and then finding the appropriate drivers for those devices; however, everything worked out of the box, including the ATI graphics, the only issue was finding the 64bit version of applications I use and know she’d be using. All in all I had her laptop setup and ready to go in about 1 1/2 hours, not too shabby considering installing the standard 32bit version of Windows XP usually takes about 3 hours if you dont have the drivers or SP3 already downloaded.
Initially my sister tells me, when I give her the laptop back, that she was joking about installing Ubuntu, however I told her twice that I was going to install Ubuntu and heard no objections, but she decided to give Ubuntu a try, then she asks me if I can dual-boot her laptop like I have done with my desktop and laptop many many times before, its very simple for me to do now. However, again since its a 64bit cpu I figure I’ll install Windows XP 64bit Edition. Things begin to degrade quickly when I start up the installer, the old dos-looking installer bit, not the graphical setup part. About 70% into installing the laptop suddenly shuts off, I figure its a battery or loose conection, so I fix them and try it again, 21% this time before the laptop shuts off. Its about then I notice that the cooling-fan part of the laptop is barely touchable its so hot, the laptop had been shutting off due to overheating. This is the first time I’ve ever had to deal with a piece of hardware that overheats from just installing a OS, and this didn’t happen to me when I was installing Ubuntu.
The problem was eventually solved when I took the laptop out into the garage, a cool 23F, and let it to install in there which surprisingly worked. Next step, install drivers, easier said then done and this is the point where I gave up. Google searching for 64bit drivers over a span of 3 hours turned up only one driver that actually worked, the ATI video driver, everything else hasn’t worked or for some reason is hosted on a shitty filehosting site called rapidshare, aka rapidshit. At this point I’ve decided I’m going to try Windows XP 32bit but not until tomorrow, I don’t wish to spend my whole evening working with the black hole that is Windows.
