Visited $mentor[0] today. We hiked a good hike. I brought some of my bean dip, and we ate it. (I seem to be on a continuing quest to spread my bean dip to everyone I come into contact with. Bean dip for all!)

$mentor[0]'s computer, an aging Windows 98 box, has been having all sorts of strange problems lately, most of which I attribute to the nature of Windows, although I haven't yet completely ruled out a possible hardware failure.

With increasing frequency, it spits a GPF immediately upon bootup, before anything is even opened. But not always. Sometimes, it complains about Registry corruption. Once when I tried, it just went straight to blue screen for me. Rarely does it successfully finish booting up to the point of being able to run programs, but there seem to be slightly different variations on the errors every time.

After examining things for a few minutes, I conluded that an OS reinstall would be in order. Though the remote possibility existed that it could have been a hardware problem, the only way to really find out would be to start fresh. (Memory or hard drive corruption? Unlikely, but I wasn't ruling it out just yet.)

After making sure $mentor[0] had all critical files backed up to floppies, he dug out the Win98 backup cd, I put it in, sat back, and started the install.

While waiting for the files to copy, we decided to watch our movie for the night: Citizen Kane. I had brought along my copy, and we put it in and started watching.

Midway through the movie, the screen froze on the scene where Kane first visits Susan Alexander, and would not budge from there. It looked like it was trying to do a layer switch, but the player was having trouble reading the second layer. I tried every technique I knew, washed the disc several times, but it would not read that scene, or any chapters after it, without freezing. Frustrating.

Eventually, we gave up on that, and reverted to watching $mentor[0]'s copy of Life is Beautiful, VHS pan-scan edition. It was a touching movie. Very excellent. I could see why it won the Academy Award.

Back to the Win98 reinstall. It had basicly done its thing, or so I thought. Went through the ritual multiple reboots and mystery progress bars associated with any Windows install procedure, and ended up with...

The same damn mess that had been there to begin with. It had not wiped the hard drive. No repartitioning had occurred. All the files on the hard drive were still in tact. So were the crashes on subsequent bootups.

During the install, I had found it somewhat odd that the thing never asked me about repartitioning the hard drive, or clobbering the old install. For that matter, the Windows install hadn't asked much of anything at all. It just went about its merry way, and I assumed that in typical Microsoft tradition, it had done its thing without informing the user what was going on. But it hadn't done a damn thing! (Except perhaps to copy some files from the cd to the hard drive, but it obviously didn't replace whatever had been causing the crashes.)

With the exception of occassional Windows installs on boxes at my job a couple years ago, I have been out of the Windows world (at least as far as installing goes) since Windows 95. Therefore, I was unprepared for the craptitude to which the MS install program has apparently sunk. Any OS install program should include an optional feature to repartition the hard drive and/or select the target drive it will be installed to. If a version already exists, it should ask if you want to wipe it and start fresh, or upgrade and preserve existing files. This should especially be the case with an OS as prone to corruption as Windows.

I shudder to think what more recent versions of Microsoft's OS installation procedure might look like.

Well, I knew now what the next thing to do would be. Run fdisk manually (since the OS installation program is simply too stupid to do it), and start it again. But it was late.

$mentor[0] was at the point of concluding that it was time to go out and buy a new computer.

I was like, "No, don't waste your money unless you have to." Really, unless there is something truly wrong with the hardware, for what he does with it, this guy does not need any new hardware. In the new economy, being as cash-strapped as anybody, he does not need this additional expense.

So I told him I would come back sometime in the next few days, and make another attempt.

I know what many of the readers around here are probably thinking, because the same thing was going through my head. Why not recommend he try out Linux?

Well, I did mention while we were talking that Linux is what I use to avoid the Windows plague on my system, but I stopped short of recommending it to him for his use. Why?

Well, honestly, despite all the UI advances that have been made in recent years, I don't think he could handle it. This is a person whose skill level I would classify as barely competent at even using Windows. He stumbles through it enough to get most of what he needs to do done, but even the more basic features of Explorer seem to baffle him.

Now, if this were the only computer he regularly used, I would imagine that he would probably be able to handle KDE as well as he does Windows. Stumble through it, and more or less get the basic stuff done. But it isn't. He uses other computers at work, and they run Windows.

If one computer is acting one way, and the other is behaving differently in subtle ways -- even if they are equally user-friendly -- it's going to confuse the hell out of this man more than it already does.

Also, he likes to buy shrinkwrapped software every now and then, and maybe use an occassional oddball USB peripheral. (Even though he doesn't know what USB is.) He puts the manufacturer's cd in, and wants it to work. With Windows, sometimes it does.

Therefore, I am left with the sad conclusion, that no, in this case, recommending Linux, even one of the more user friendly distros, would not be beneficial.

Sucks, doesn't it?

So, the evening was a double dose of things failing. The movie, and the computer. We concluded that it was jinxed.

Now, having brought the disc back here and watched the second half of Citizen Kane without any problems on Argo, I am left to conclude that his player is probably going bad in a manner similar to the one I had a couple years ago, though it is a totally different brand name and model. Here's to all the cheap, shoddily manufactured consumer electronics devices made by sweatshop slave labor in China, and overcaffeinated programmers in Redmond.

Now I'm going to bed.