Microsoft, let's just be friends. It's for the best.

So my laptop’s motherboard died, but thankfully I had done a backup a few days prior so no data was lost this time around. Seeing as replacing the motherboard would be just as expensive as buying the same computer on eBay, I opted to spring for a new ‘puter seeing as I could desperately use the extra processing power and RAM. I went first with a sexy little Toshiba with Vista on it, thinking I could just install XP on it instead. Twelve hours later after Nuking the hard drive, attempting various methods of slipstreaming, I gave up in frustration and went to bed.The next morning after weighing my options before I got out of bed I did a few scenerio-based researches online and figured the way to go was a Macbook running Bootcamp so I could still run all my Windows programs, along with a PCMCIA to ExpressCard adapter to run my sound card and EVDO card. It would cost more in the beginning but I felt I’d be happier in the next 3-6 years I’d own my next laptop, since the long term Wintel solution would either be to trudge along with XP or dual boot with Ubuntu or a similar Linux distribution. Seeing as I am heavily dependent on music and graphics software I was hesitant to rely on drivers for Ubuntu, and was wary about future device support for XP. I hated Vista before I met it (DRM issues, handholding, slow performance, making their OS serve content providers and not the end user, etc), and the little time we did spend together didn’t alter my opinion.

And I have had more than one friend over iChat offer to throw a party in my honor for “seeing the light.” That’s promising. 🙂