A tale of operating systems – they dont like me

I tried to install OSx86 but it wouldn’t work. Admittedly I didn’t really put much (any) effort into correcting the problem though. I might mess around with trying to get it going in VMware Player or something later. Next up I decided to give Syllable a try for no particular reason. It would also not install properly. I then tried to install ReactOS and it ALSO failed with an equally epic list of complaints during the installation. WTF!? Well OK I was half expecting ReactOS to have some kind of problem so I wasn’t really surprised by that last failure. I had tried out a LiveCD of it over 9000 years ago and even that had some problem with my computers hardware. But I would have thought I would have gotten farther into the installation process or have alternatively failed earlier. Whatever I don’t feel like getting into the details of it.

So anyways I’m back to using a legitimate and non micro Windows XP.

A tale of operating systems – MicroXP v0.82

So yeah I got sick of Windows 7 and wanted to switch back. But I didn’t really have much bandwidth to spare at the time to grab a full installation CD for XP (freaken monthly bandwidth caps make me rage and I actually failed to stay under it for last month… oops…) and MicroXP was tempting in all of its tinyness so I figured I would give it a try. Its really just XP but with a bunch of uneccessary stuff torn out and a few things thrown in. Same idea as TinyXP (which is coincidentally made by the same people) and the over 9000 other shrunk down variants of Windows OSes available online. If some of the haters (unsubstantiated?) claims of botnets turn you off you can always make a similarly slimmed down copy of Windows using nLite or vLite. Clocking in with a CD size under 100mb and an install size of roughly 205mb its still larger then Damn Small Linux but is still freaken cool in a novelty kinda way. Plus it actually performs better and consumes less ram and the difference actually seemed really noticeable which I wasn’t expecting though thats probable in part just a placebo effect. The absence of some drivers and things can at times really suck. It was a bit of a pain getting audio working and Visual C++ Express absolutely refuses to install. The novelty of its minor difference in size and performance isnt really enough to justafy shit not working so its not worth using long term and now that I’ve got a proper copy of XP I’ll probable be installing that sometime soon. Still its pretty freaken nice as a short term thing.

A tale of operating systems – Windows 7 Ultimate

So my computer got a little fucked up recently (by virut… again… maybe something I have on a disc has it and I’ve just been reinfecting myself) and then I further fucked it up and somehow that handy recovery partition was also victimized by the fuckage and on top of that I have no idea what happened to the XP disc that presumably came with my PC.

No biggie.

I had already gotten all of my stuff that I wanted to hold onto (minus executable which I figure are best to just assume to be compromised) to a secondary hard drive and a couple discs. Plus I had been wanting to try out Windows 7 anyways so it was a nice excuse to do so.

So I grabbed a download of Windows 7 Ultimate by completely legal means (because sure that’s totally believable) and gave it an install. I thought the installer was really rather nice. I’m kinda neutral about the OS itself though. Some things are nice well other changes make me totally rage. I really prefer the original start menu for example. Plus whats the deal with the white text on the super bright task bar? Even if you where going to make that the default why the frack wouldn’t it be customizable in the control panel display options? Do you seriously have to be running some third party crap just to change that? Everything about 7 it seems overly bright and blurry (ClearType = less clear) and illegible and unintuitive. Its technically more visually impressive (look the windows have transparencies and they make things behind them all blurry!) but aesthetically and functionally I think its kinda ugly. Its not really that bad and the changes probably wouldn’t seem seem so jarring if I had been using Vista before it. I am actually rather impressed by how well it performed. I was somewhat expecting it to be unusable but even with junk like Aero turned on it functioned fine on my PC and it wasn’t even behaving much more sluggish then XP did. Still there isn’t really any new functionality in it that I actually need so there wasn’t much reason for me to need to adjust to the changes or put up with it making my computer run ever so slightly slower then it did with XP. So I decided against sticking with 7. On to the next OS.