Allow me to get a little nerdy here. Digging through my storage I stumbled upon one of my first laptops, an eMachine M6805. I decided to pull it out and use it for a pet project, namely a Kubuntu installation. With a 64 bit AMD chip and 1.25 GB of RAM it’s a solid little machine for being several years old.
In a former life it been my test bed for Vista. The logic behind that was if it ran well on this it should run well on any newer hardware I acquire. Not to mention, my main machine was running XP SP2 at the time and I wasn’t inclined to screw with it.
Being the thorough geek that I am, I do a little googling* before slapping Linux on it. My research proved to be fruitful and I discovered an issue with the older BIOS firmware. Thankfully a simple upgrade would resolve it. Well, I thought it would be simple at the time. Like I said, it was my Vista test bed, so that damn bloated OS was still running on this puppy. I downloaded the BIOS update and tried to run it. No dice. Then I went and tried some of the tricks that Vista is supposed to have under it’s hood (running in XP compatibility mode, turning off DEP, running as an Administrator, etc). Nothing worked. Not a single damn thing I tried would allow this update to run.
At that point I just had to laugh. In order to install Linux I would have to install XP. The fact that Vista couldn’t perform a simple BIOS update was just hilarious. The more I play with Microsoft’s newest toy, the more convinced I am it’s just a pig in a dress. Same old stinky shit (a little worse for wear in my opinion) with some pretty trappings to hide the hideousness. In the very near future Linux will successfully pass the “grandma test” and once it does those cats in Redmond are going to be in for a rude awakening.
Thank you for indulging my very dorky bitching about M$.
* I didn’t believe it either, but this is now in the dictionary.
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