One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

So, after running around in circles this week, and getting all my homework done early, I basically had this afternoon off.

I did a bunch of random stuff, and then Dave and i went to Bob’s to get some food and then we went to the campus movie, Men in Black 2. (Not nearly as good as the first one, but worth the two bucks it cost.) When we got back, I checked my ICQ and then went downstairs to check out Dave’s new TV card. When I got back, my computer was frozen solid.

Solid freezes are actually a rarity for me since I switched to NT4 way back when - they simply don’t happen anymore. So I thought “That’s odd,” and cycled power on the machine. It didn’t come up again.

For what it’s worth, my machine’s been acting odd all week. Memory errors have been popping up left and right, and that usually means one of three things: Processor/mainboard, RAM, or disk interfaces.

Anyway, so my machine’s not starting up. There’s an answering machine message too, it’s an invite to go over to Pat’s, play some Monopoly and drink some beers. Fuck my computer, I’m leaving.

So I get home around 2AM, and realize that I can’t do shit without my computer. Bah, I’m not that tired and I can sleep in as late as I want tomorrow. Let’s do some quick diagnosis to see what’s going on.

Power on: no boot. Locks at POST screen.
Pull the box out. Unhook hard drives. Locks at POST.
Pull out the hard drive controller (Promise U100TX2.) Boot begins (but fails due to lack of boot device.) Ah!
Unhook DVD and connect HD’s to primary IDE connector on mobo. Boot fails (BIOS boot order didn’t have an entry for IDE0.)
Fix BIOS. Boot again. Up comes the ever-popular SomethingAwful XP bootscreen, and then XP in its all its wondrous glory. After it detects the drives, it proceeds to drop directly to desktop, just as if it had been rebooted midstream - didn’t save my desktop theme changes, but otherwise it is fine.

So I’m sitting here, utterly stunned; if this had been NT4, I wouldn’t have made it to a login screen; Win2k would have probably netted the same result. XP is a good fucking operating system, regardless of what anybody says. It handled a complete swap of disk controllers and startup disks like … well, like a Mac would have.

Digression: Back in the day when I had my Performa, I always thought that one of the niftiest things about the Mac OS was that it would boot from damn near anything that had a copy of OS7 on it. CD’s, other hard drives, floppies(!). Still to this day this capability remains unprecedented; you can boot an Open Firmware Mac directly into OF, to a firewire disk, to CD, off your iPod, or pretty much anything else that can hold a copy of OS9. OS X is a little more interesting, but still retains the lion’s share of this functionality.

And thus, we find our hero at yet another dilemma. XP is good. I mean really good. It’s fast, incredibly rock-solid stable and never has given me any reason to question its reliability. Even through all the shit Microsoft has done to it, my XP desktop has remained 100% rock solid stable. So now I’m asking myself: Why do I need OS X again?