Monday, September 24, 2007

Back to Ubuntu

About two weeks ago we bought a new computer after the wife got frustrated with Ubuntu. We got the new computer home and fired it up and it kept rebooting after an error message "The OS didn't install correctly and will restart". After a fresh install, registration and what not the computer was up and running. I tried installing a wireless USB card but it wasn't supported by Vista and I had it working but Vista was never stable after that. It kept freezing up and we had 3-4 blue screens of death. (I thought that was fixed, I never got one with XP) The wife was not at all pleased with this and she wasn't listening to my argument that it was the wireless card and not Vista. I thought I had it stable after reinstalling an updated driver but the wife claimed to still have issues with it so we ended up returning it yesterday.

Jen emailed a friend who owns a Mac and she talked Jen into wanting one. I told the tech at Fry's that we're thinking of getting a Mac and he said he's had a bunch of people return their new Vista machine for a Mac. I'm on the fence with getting a Mac, but at least with Apple moving to Intel processors I can fall back on running a dual boot system with Windows and/or Ubuntu.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes,

I agree with your assessment. If you control who makes your hardware and peripherals, you can provide better reliability on third party products.

Isn't this exactly what Vista is supposed to accomplish? make 3rd party hardware vendors more responsible by providing digitally signed/tested drivers?

Your wife's expectation that a non supported device, using an old driver, written for an old OS should be usable, is not very realistic. Try this scenario with a Mac. I don't think you'll get very far. I'm not sure how compatible old Mac peripherals are with new OS's.

What I would ask myself:

Would it be more cost effective to replace all your peripherals with mac peripherals, or update the PC peripherals with ones that are not compatible?
Then you need to update the software... I moved to Vista awhile ago, and I get a blue screen once a month or so. I am still finding out software that I am missing.

For example, I wanted to burn a dvd the other day, and noticed that I didn't have Nero. When I tried to install it, it told me that my version of Nero wasn't supported by vista. There wasn't a patch for it, basically the website told me to buy the new version.