Activation, Drivers, and DRM, Oh My!
Apparently I'm not too great at staying on-topic. However, this post feels like it has merit.
Basically, the events of the past weekend have left me missing my Mac. It hasn't gone anywhere, but after dealing with Windows for a weekend, I'm about to give up and just use my Mac.
This whole crazy debacle began about a year ago. I bought a motherboard and CPU from Fry's because the motherboard was basically free. I decided that I'd just upgrade it later, and in the meantime have a computer to use and some cash to spend elsewhere.
The time finally came where I decided that 2 Gb of RAM wasn't enough, so I went to Fry's and picked out another motherboard, an MSI P45 Neo3. I know, Fry's isn't the cheapest, but Newegg was only $15-20 cheaper and I wanted something to do this weekend. (Little did I know what was to come.) So, out I walked on Friday with it and an additional 4 Gb of RAM. Not only will Flight Simulator love the new RAM, but so will Vista in general, as well as the virtualization experimenting I'll be doing soon with Xen.
So, I set to work. An hour or two later, the board was installed, and I booted it up. Windows blue-screened. This was expected, as Windows does not like its hardware changed like that. My Gentoo partition wasn't thrilled either, so I set to work with Windows first, knowing that I was basically going to have to reinstall.
So I do my reinstall using my legally-obtained Vista Ultimate Upgrade, courtesy of the Ultimate Steal promo that Microsoft is running. Attempting to activate failed, reminding me that I purchased the upgrade and not a full version. Ok, so I perform an "upgrade" from Vista Ultimate to...Vista Ultimate. Activation works then. Why, Microsoft, must I jump through this hoop? It's rather ridiculous. A pirate wouldn't have to deal with this, but I gave you my money, so now I must suffer.
Next up is drivers. I proceed to use the drivers on the CD to at least get me to a network connection, and then I use the ones off the MSI site. Since then, I don't think I've shut off the machine in a normal way - I get tired of rebooting from hard lockups and eventually just power off instead of reboot.
Hmm, how could I possibly fix this? I bet a Windows Update will solve my problems! So, updates install, and the system reboots. Black screen. That's odd... reboot...last known good configuration...black screen. This is getting ridiculous.
Should I mention that, in there, I attempted to install Flight Simulator and was greeted by an invitation to call Microsoft and sit on hold for 10 minutes so I could activate my legally-purchased software? A pirate would have been up and running long ago.
Should I also mention that I emerged KDE with Gentoo earlier, and while the compile didn't finish due to my lack of knowledge, everything compiled without strange lockups? On a hot day, no less? This tends to rule out hardware failure, though I'll run some tests later this week to be sure. The temperatures never go into the 50s, however, so I'm pretty sure cooling is not an issue.
All things considered, even if the Mac does cost a little bit more for similar hardware to the PC world, my time is worth more. I'd rather go learn how to fly a real plane anyway.