The slough of despond

So the journey continues. As I was saying in my windows 3.1 days I was using a 486 66MhzDX2 system. This is when the Pentium Pro hit the market, so I was quite a bit behind the times. I got married during this time period, and started selling Microsoft business services I also upgraded to a AMD K62-350Mhz machine. (OOOOO!!! Snort! Cough! Gag!) and of course put on good old Windows 95. Enter the bsod!!! This became a weekly occurance, usually while surfing the internet. Which was always nice after a half hour download, in which I would usually leave my system running, and go do something else. When I came back I had a little suprise on the screen for me! Not only that but my first real experience with Microsoft's business practices was starting to take it's toll on me at work. Cold calling on their behalf was an interesting experience to say the least. I moved on from there to retail sales and upgraded again to a half decent (for 2000 anyways) Pentium III 667Mhz system. I finally made the move to Windows 98 SE surely now there would be no sign of the dreadful bsod. Fat chance of that! Not only did I get that but some of the weirdest system behaviour for which to this day I have no explaination for. I was doing some web development and when I tried to get web pages on the local host in internet explorer page cannot be displayed came up. In Netscape the page came up as expected. So I repartitioned the drive, reformatted the drive and reinstalled windows...result samething...replaced the hard drive...same thing. Don't ask me what it was I have no idea. The weirdest thing is the old system did the same thing, till I upgraded it on a lark to Windows XP Pro go figure. At this time I was developing in ASP with a MySQL database. Ever watch paint dry, that's what it was like waiting for ASP to render the pages, and make all the queries, etc. It was even worse trying to do it with MSSQL. The horror that is Access still haunts me to this day. To my amusement one of our clientel who were doing a scary amount of business several hundred thousand dollars a day, didn't listen to our pleas about backing up their data. Guess what database package they were using? You guessed it Access. Well they were too cheap to spend a few thousand on an appropriate backup system, and lost whole job descriptions. Considering who their clientel were that was bad news. Needless to say their head of IT suddenly found himself jobless. The CEO ordered some serious servers to make sure they had proper backups. Unfortunately they still insisted on using the totally unstable Access. So for not wanting to spend $2000 - $3000 they ended up loosing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and spent that much again to make sure it didn't happen ever again. When I pointed out had they been using DB2, or Oracle it never would have happened in the first place, they just got annoyed. I guess no one likes to be reminded of a bad decision. Not suprisingly they have since stopped using Access altogether, and have switched to DB2. Time after time I bumped into all kinds of weirdness dealing direct with Microsoft sales reps, and the RMA department. I got to deal with RMA because I started working in the service department as well. Needless to say, there was a lot of unexplicable operating systems I came across. To which the most cost effective solution was reformat reinstall, until it happens again. To which I had done several times personally by this time. Around 2002 I upgraded again, and left my sales job. This time I was running a decent box Athlon XP 2100+ with a gigabyte of RAM. In fact I'm still using that box. I started doing technical support for an american dsl company, and decided to help out with supporting MSN which they were bundling. You think I would have learned by now I was thoroughly disgusted with Microsoft software and really didn't want any more dealings with it than necessary. I still was using it at home though. Then enter my brother-in-law. Who wanted me to help him with his startup, but he believing Microsoft to be a thoroughly vile institution for reasons other than my own wanted a strictly non-ms shop. I had never contemplated this before, but decided to take the plunge enter Linux. I bought a second drive and installed Mandrake (as it was called back then) I wouldn't say that it was problem free, and there was a bit of a learning curve. I hadn't touch a POSIX type operating system for almost a decade by that time, and Linux being a work in progress had some glitches to deal with. I didn't care it was actually refreshing because the glitches, were something I could actually deal with. It wasn't just a blue screen 0E Fatal Error starring me in the face. In fact I found out that most weirdness that happened with my system, had a decidedly non-weird explanation. This was such a relief from windows, that I probably could not describe the weight that was lifted from my day to day work. Not only was there a viable reason for problems that occured with my operating system, there were a ton of people willing to help me out with it. This is something I had never encountered before. Let me tell you it was a real eye opener. For years I put up with mediocrity in my software because I didn't know there was anything else. Now I know there's an alternative, albeit it's not without it's own issues, but these issues in my opinion are far outweigh the annoyances I had put up with previously.

Next time we'll talk about taking the plunge and freeing oneself of the bluescreen and I'll discuss some of the distributions I've tried out, and what I learned about them.