Let me start by saying I love my Asus EEE PC. It's little, it's light, it's got a battery that will last past judgement day.
<---Actual size.
The Catch: It comes preinstalled with Windows XP.
I'm not a fan of Micro$oft, as most of you know, but I was going to swallow my pride for the sake of ultra-portable internet bliss.
So I get everything set up and I was surfing the web while watching a little Band of Brothers. And right as the courageous members of Easy Company were being shelled by the Germans while foxholed during the Battle of the Bulge...I got a virus. I got three viruses.
Windows informed me of this in the most annoying way possible. Three pop-up windows that could not be minimized or hidden. These windows informed me that my computer was infected and that I should click this link to clean the computer. The link brought me to a website proffering some anti-virus software for only 59.99. "Bullocks!" I exclaimed. I can live with a couple of viruses. exempli gratia: people live long happy lives with HPV.
So I close the pop-ups and go about my business. The thing is, these windows keep popping up. Literally every 20 seconds, these same three windows would pop up and obscure my entire screen, rendering my machine useless.
The thing is, the application sending these annoying pop-ups was hidden somewhere on my computer. I couldn't even find it and delete it. This process took me a long time since I would need to stop the search every 20 seconds to close those damn pop-up windows.
Eventually, I threw up my hands and decided to wipe that ungodly operating system from my hardware.
The solution:
Linux, sweet linux. Ubuntu is beautiful. Ubuntu is virus-free. Ubuntu costs nothing. The GUI is simple, efficient, and did I mention that it's free? Did I mention that it comes with a copy of OpenOffice which can open and edit word documents just like Windows Office? Did I mention that it's free?
So, I'll let you know how it goes, but so far so good. The installation wasn't exactly foolproof as my computer has no optical drive. I needed to install Ubuntu on a usb drive and make the drive bootable.
I gotta run, I'm in Luck, WI right now at West Denmark Family Camp. More on that later.
Sprocketplug Out
1 comment:
that's what you get for going against steve jobs, your overlord and savior.
i've heard great things about ubunto, though, so good luck with that.
now get your ass down to RW and we can kick it old school.
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