Basternae.org

I like Linux and know it pretty well.  I also like Windows and I know it extremely well.  I can use either as my desktop pretty effectively, but I’m better with Windows and best when I have both available.

That’s why I’m very happy that I can finally run Windows again on my main desktop.  I tried Windows 7 for a week and it almost worked, but only supported 2 of my 3 monitors at best thanks to the drivers for the two different Nvidia cards in my system not wanting to play nice together.

Well, now that Windows 7 has been installed, the Vista install was actually able to see and use one of my drive partitions.  I’ve installed it and spent half a day loading up all of the essentials I can’t live without.  Visual Studio, Dreamweaver, WinSCP, CDBurnerXP, OneNote, CoolEdit 2000, WinMege, VLC, Word, Excel, Winamp, and Audiograbber are the “killer apps” for me on Windows.  Say what you will about Vista, for me it’s the most functional and stable OS available.  Windows 7 won’t be ready to take its place for another year or so (probably at SP1).

As much fun as it is to be able to run Windows in VirtualBox, writing code is a *LOT* better when I have three monitors to do it on.

It’s bad enough that I can’t run Windows natively on either of my computers. Well, now the Vista virtual machine on my laptop is hosed up and bluescreens on boot up. This wouldn’t be such a big deal, but that VM has the most recent version of the Basternae codebase. If I can’t get it working, I lose 2-3 days of work, including all of the changes/fixes for the test that I posted about a few days ago.

Does this mean that my WinXP laptop at work is next?

I have two computers at home — a cheapie $400 Gateway T-8635u laptop I bought on sale at Newegg a couple months ago and a homebuilt desktop based on a Gigabyte P43-ES3G motherboard, E8200 CPU, 4GB of RAM, Nvidia 7600GT and FX5500 GTS video cards, 2 Envy24-based sound cards, two Samsung DVD-RW drives, and 320, 500, and 640 GB SATA drives.  Pretty standard, mainstream hardware.

Well, strangely enough I’m completely incapable of running Windows natively on either one.

The laptop has a “restore partition” that you have to use to install Windows.  When I first got the thing, I set it up as a dual-boot Ubuntu and Vista machine.  Well, the Vista partition somehow got corrupted and attempts to restore from the “restore partition” always fail.

No problem, I can just boot to a “real” Windows OS disk.  No luck.  If I boot to WinXP, the machine bluescreens and reboots after I hit the “F8 - I Agree” after the license.

Instead I have Ubuntu with VirtualBox loaded on the laptop and Vista installed in that, which runs perfectly fine.  It just won’t run on the hardware without Linux in-between.

OK, now on to the desktop.  If I try to boot to Vista, it bluescreens before the splashscreen and instantly reboots.  If I try to boot to the install CD, I get as far as selecting the drive to install to before being told that there are no valid drives installed.  I can run Ubuntu fine, and have WinXP installed in a VirtualBox so I can run the essentials — Visual Studio, Netflix player, DVD player (still haven’t gotten DVD playback working in Linux.  How lame.)  The bad thing is that I can’t access my Mustek A3 scanner (but the Canon LiDE works great).

It’s a little sad that I *have* to run Windows to accomplish the things I want to do, but the market share of Linux sucks so bad that I couldn’t *buy* software if I wanted to.  And I do.  I’m not above paying for things that are useful.  I’d gladly shell out $3-600 for a native copy of Photoshop or VS2008 on Ubuntu.  After all, I make more than enough money from doing work on those apps to justify buying them.

It just sucks that I can’t run Windows natively on any of my systems.  If only they had decent hardware support, but Microsoft is trying really hard to fail at OSes.  Everyone says that Windows 7 will be the be-all-end-all operating system, but I’ve used it and just don’t see it.  It’s just Vista for people with touchscreens.