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Switching to Windows: Not as easy as you think

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This is the way the world of Linux ends. Not with a whimper, but with a bang.
I grew up on a Unix command-line. BSD, I believe. I have dim memories of dialing up on a black and green Wyse50 terminal, sending e-mail with 'mail', reading newsgroups and playing Nethack in all its ASCII glory. I even became rather adept at vi. I was happy, ecstatic even, wrapped all snug and safe in my warm, green world of text and terminal beeps. But my friends all had 'IBM clones', and as I grew, so too did the technology. My early youth was tinged in the stark, cyan tones of CGA. My preteens were illustrated in glorious EGA, and as I came of age, so too did the startling, varied hues of SVGA. But I get ahead of myself. As a child, we did play games, primitive games, on these 'IBM clones'. Bolderdash, Centipede, Double-Dragon, Golden Axe. But no computer game could compare to the imagination of a ten-year-old boy! And so for the better part of my youth I remained shrouded by the eerie, flickering glow of scrolling text. My first experience with a 'Graphical User Interface' was an X-terminal. Then it was Red Hat Linux all the way, until Ubuntu walked itself onto my desktop nearly a year ago... and there things should have ended.

Except that life does not always go according to plan. You see, I was typing one day, at work. Just typing, tapping the hours merrily away, and suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, my computer rebooted. It reset, then reset again, and continued to reset, sometimes making it past POST, sometimes not, but certainly never managing to boot an OS. And the CD drive was making weird, grinding noises. "Calm down, little computer", I cooed softly, but it didn't, so I jerked the power cord out with a vindictive snarl, and then unplugged the CD-ROM. Then gently, gently, ever so gently, I turned the PC on again. There was a loud bang, a nasty smell (think burnt cabbage) and a lot of smoke billowed out from the hole where the CD-ROM used to be. I was a little surprised. Upon further investigation I discovered that a tiny black thing had fallen off the motherboard and hit a tiny, round white thing with copper wires running around it. Curious, I sticky-taped the little black thing back onto the motherboard, in approximately the same place it had been before it fell off, and tried the power switch again. Nothing. At this point, the idea occurred to me that maybe my computer was broken. Luckily, we had plenty of spare parts around the office. Briefly, I considered transplanting my hard drive into one of the spare machines. Then I noticed the Windows XP OEM license key stuck to the side of a nearly empty chassis, and had a better idea! "Oh ho!" I thought to myself, "Why not use this opportunity to try a fresh install of this 'Windows XP' I keep hearing so much about." So I grabbed an all-in-one Intel board, and a spare 200GB IDE hard-drive we had kicking around, then rooted through the cookie jar for some RAM chips that I jammed into slots until I heard clicks. Then I rooted through the trash pile until I found a Windows XP OEM CD, and we were all set for this grand electronic experiment!

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