Woes
God sake, computers, what is wrong with you?
Running Fedora 12 as my main OS at the moment. It’s fine for some things but I honestly prefer Windows Seven to anything else and I long to go back to it.
But my stupid Windows installation is fucked. Some bits in the registry must seriously be corrupted beyond all hell. I don’t know where the Windows serial number information is stored in the registry but it cannot currently be a valid entry because selecting Computer » Properties displays some generic error message under serial information. And I can’t read or edit it using third party tools so I don’t know what’s gone wrong there. I tried reinstalling it at one point but I’ll lose all my settings if I do a from-scratch installation and it won’t allow me to do an in-place upgrade because my user data is on a different partition from my Windows installation (some monumentally stupid restrictions on Windows installation there that amounted to the most trouble I’ve ever had with a Windows upgrade when I switched from Vista to Seven).
What’s more is that my Windows BCD is also fucked. That can’t be read or written by BCDEdit.exe or EasyBCD for again some unknown (and maybe unknowable) reason. But my Windows Seven installation still boots when I ask it to. Could this be my GRUB bootloader interfering? Maybe, but I’m pretty sure EasyBCD should know what’s going on there. It doesn’t, and it doesn’t even load to the main interface to let me see what it thinks is going on. Great. But my Windows installation’s serial information is still messed up so Windows thinks it’s not genuine and therefore powers off after whatever set amount of time that is. A few hours maybe? It’s not long, at any rate.
I really want to reinstall Windows Seven but I can’t decide how to go about doing it. If I format everything it means a long, drawn-out reinstallation of all my Windows software (Office, browser, games, μTorrent etc.) and reconfiguring it to have all my custom shell folders and appearances and everything else that I’ve had to do to make Windows less of a piece of shit to use. But I can’t see any other way around it and I’m very wary of putting in installation CDs because they tend to silently change boot settings that will make it impossible or difficult to boot back into Fedora which is currently my most usable OS.
If I get some time this weekend in between all the other real-life jobs I’ve got to get done in preparation for my trip the following weekend, I might image my whole boot drive to my spare HD and then go about trying to patch up my broken installations. It’d be useful to be able to dual-boot Fedora and Seven until someone gets their act together to make one OS that can do all the good things of both but failing that I’d much rather have my Seven installation fully-functional than have it broken and dormant on my hard drive while I use Linux, forever lurking in the back of my mind and brought to the forefront every time I am frustrated by how pathetic Gnome is for anyone who actually uses a PC (Nautilus seems to have this great feature that means sometimes windows open with no address bar and navigating the filesystem spawns new windows every time I want to change directory – as if anyone’s ever found that Windows 95-esque interface helpful at all, ever) which is basically every time I want to open a file.
This isn’t really a request for advice although I suspect many of you will have “opinions” on the matter and suggestions from “learn2Linux” to “go and buy a Mac lol” which I of course would read and give full consideration to. And if anyone tells me to just scrap the box and all of technology and go live in a cave somewhere, well, I might take their advice because at the moment avoiding all the hassle forever and becoming a hermit is a very tempting option.
Story Time!
When I was a kid (and we’re talking infant school here), sometimes I let my imagination get the better of me. I had (have?) a really good imagination and I’m surprised it didn’t lead me to more a more theistic worldview. But I guess you need gullibility as well as imagination? Anyway:
I used to pretend that in order to get a pen working that had stopped, you could ‘trick’ it into beginning to work again by writing swear words in big letters in your school book over and over again. The pen would realise what you were doing and it would try and mischievously get you into trouble (the pens were obviously very mischievous – why else stop working in the middle of a school day for no reason?) by turning the inkflow on again just as you’d stopped paying attention to what you were writing and would unconsciously proceed to write “FUCK” in big letters across your times tables.
But I always just used to feign inattentiveness to doubly trick the pen. Once it started to produce the goods again and work for me, I’d just stop writing. And there it was, I’d outsmarted the pen. I don’t remember if the pen continued to work for a while because it couldn’t just withhold ink immediately at will or whether that was just a cover to not let me know that I’d outsmarted it, because it was too proud to concede defeat. Either way, this method got excellent results and I recommend it to anyone who needs to get a dry pen working again in a hurry. But remember, it has to be something important that you’re scrawling bad things on. The word “cunt” at the top of your mother’s day card, for example, or your girlfriend’s sister’s name on a gift tag or something like that.