Okay, maybe it's time...

I know last post (what, a month ago?!) I said that there's no reason to hate Vista. Now I've been using Vista on my desktop since I replaced it in February last, and after a while, it started feeling a little sluggish. But then I added two more gigabytes of RAM and it was a speed demon again.

Then my wife bought me a laptop for our anniversary. I love it. It's got 1 gig of RAM, and a dual core processor. And it takes about 6 minutes to boot from cold to usable, excluding the time it takes me to type in my name and password.

Then one day, my desktop started blue-screening. Regularly. Twice in an afternoon. Worried for the health of my computer, I downloaded Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Live CD and ran the memtest86+ utility. The screen went from blue (okay) to bright red (not okay) in less time than it took me to press Enter. So I started testing each stick separately, and it was my new sticks of RAM. Crap. So I sent them back to the place I bought them. They're replacing them, very nicely and very quickly.

But now I am back to 1gb of RAM in my desktop. And I've got to be honest, I'm a little spoiled after that time spent as sir speedy. It's freaking molasses. So, I installed Feisty Fawn, then updated to Gutsy Gibbon.

You know what? I liked it so much, I installed it on my laptop.

You know what else? It's set as the default for both machines now. When you've got a 160GB laptop hard drive and you keep most of your important stuff on the desktop computer, you can dual boot a laptop easily.

I still like MS products. I'm hoping to get a copy of XP to replace Vista on my laptop. But when I can boot in to Ubuntu in a matter of less than 2 minutes, still access all the same files and formats on my Windows partitions - hell, I save all my data into the Windows partition and if I have to I can still boot into Vista and have that data available.

But it's clean, it's secure, and damn, it's pretty. And that sells a lot of people over.