Peenie Wallie

Back in November 2007, my Windows XP desktop computer at home finally died, due to a hard drive failure.

Having switched to Mac OS X 3 years earlier, I wasn't too upset about the loss. The PC had been relegated to a few secondary tasks anyway; and I rarely used my home office anymore, since the acquisition of a laptop in September has allowed to me work from any room in the house.

Instead, I considered this an opportunity to finally banish Microsoft from my home, and convert my desktop PC to Linux. After installing Ubuntu 7.10, everything worked fine for about two weeks; except for trying to get some QuickTime videos from the Apple Trailers site to play properly. But I figured it was nothing I couldn't fix.

Then I had the problem where it would only display 800 x 600, and then finally the scrambled screen shown above.

At that point, I re-installed Windows XP. Which is too bad, because I really wanted to like Linux.

But at least my MacBook hasn't disappointed me.

UPDATE (March 20, 2008): Click here to read about what eventually happened to the Windows XP install.