!Fun With System Crashes

After approximately 18 months of service, my expleteve deleted Maxtor 96147H8 hard drive began randomly failing on sector read/writes.

A Maxtor representative arrogantly blamed me for the hard drive failure, accusing me of dropping the drive. When given a hardware diagnostic code from Maxtor scanning software, the representative confirmed that the drive was defective.

Of course, the stated minimum lifetime of the drive is five years. While the warranty on the drive expired last November. Which means I am out of a POS hard drive.

Linux was able to warn me that the drive was on fire and falling from the heavens. Windows just crashed. Fortunately, I was able to recover much of the (important) data on the drive and save to a local NTFS partition.

When I removed the defective drive (and unfortunately my new Linux partition), Windows happily told me that I had a pirated copy and refused to boot. So -- I get to nuke my Windows partition too!

So, I've spent more than 6 hours today messing around with my machines, getting angry at Maxtor for making such crappy products -- and then blaming me for their failure. ("Total Customer Satisfaction" my ass.)

Moral of the story: Maxtor and Microsoft both suck.

20 More Reasons to Dislike Microsoft

Well, it looks like we get to patch away some 20-odd new complete security vulnerabilities with the latest patches from Microsoft. I, for one, am sick of the whole process! I don't like having complete remote exploits on systems that are facing the Internet. So, I'm working on Making the Switch to Fedora Linux, the latest incarnation of Red Hat's old desktop distribution. Things have been going well so far! For those without the requisite free time to learn a new (and really fun) OS, I guess it's time to visit Windows Update again...