I broke my computer last week. I was moving my memory into another slot to see if it would stop making the annoying noise it has been making, but something went wrong. I built this computer myself, meaning that the inside is a massive jungle of IDE and power cables, mostly centered over my memory slots. As a result, I couldn't see the slot very well and was doing most of the work my feel, which turned out to be a bad idea. I thought the memory was in all the way, but it wasn't. This resulted in smoke when I turned the computer on and a few of the metal connectors on the RAM had burned. I'm pretty sure putting any other RAM in that slot afterwards would have had bad results. I could have bought some new memory and maybe a new motherboard, but I just decided it was time for a new computer. After this experience, however, I didn't feel like building one.
I came up with a plan that would allow me to get a better computer than I had before for relatively cheap. First of all, I bought a new LCD monitor last spring, so I didn't need to get a monitor. That's about $250 off the price tag. The second part of the plan was to buy a Dell preloaded with Ubuntu Linux. Linux is a free operating system, which means another few hundred dollars off the price of the computer because I don't have to buy a Windows license. This is my gaming machine, though, and so I actually want Windows on it. I have my old Windows XP CD that I can use to install Windows once I get the computer.
I got the computer yesterday, and discovered there was a flaw in the plan. I boot up the computer with the XP disc and after it loads the necessary drivers it attempts to boot into a minimal Windows XP to do the installation, but crashes with a blue screen of death. After trying some things and searching around on the internet, I finally figure out what the problem is. My Windows XP CD has the original release on it, without SP1 or SP2. It wasn't until SP2 that XP supported PCI-E based graphics cards (all new computers now use PCI-E instead of AGP). So now the plan is to buy a new Windows CD. My plan still saved me money, though, because I can get it pretty cheap through the University. I just wish it wasn't Labor Day weekend.
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I absolutely love Ubuntu, and have been using it regularly for about a year. I think even Ubuntu, with it's reputation for being a very user-friendly Linux distro, has a long way to go before it's ready for the average computer user. Second Life runs pretty great on it, though :)
You have my sympathies for the issue at hand. I've smoked a number of systems over the years, and it's never much fun :(
On your poll you ask about Vista vs XP, and I wanna put my $0.02L in : Vista is simply not a compelling "upgrade". It's a damned big pain in the ass to get Second Life to run properly unless you by chance get the right video card / driver combination that has the kind of OpenGL support required by SL.
That's not the only compatability problem you will encounter, either. I've had several compatability issues surface with older software, like those 3-year old games you still enjoy playing. And unlike the Ubuntu and SELinux "protect you from yourself" security model, Vista is way too damned intrusive with the "are you sure" stuff. It's a fine idea, but sorely lacking in the implementation.
I might feel differently if there was anything in Vista that was a "gotta have", but I've yet to see anything compelling enough for me to use Vista on a personal machine (I have to use it for work, though).
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