Ok, so my PC broke down a few months ago and I’ve been relegated to doing all my usual interweb shit via my girlfriend’s laptop or borrowing one of the college’s computers. Neither is an ideal situation for my pornographic needs, but that’s another story. I’ve been wanting to put thoughts into this space for a while, but STUPID FUCKING XP has been dogging me.

I actually don’t hate the OS. I’ve had relatively few problems with it. I decided to give the girl’s laptop an enema since I have no idea when the last time Windows had been reinstalled (I hadn’t done it myself since she got it two years ago) and it was starting to experience the Windows entropy that happens without a periodic OS colonic. So here goes me, reinstalling XP and when I try to activate via the web, MS pisses all over my serial number. Normally, this wouldn’t piss me off but this machine actually has a valid XP key slapped on it. Gen-u-wine sticker stuck to the machine and everything. So I figure, fuck it, I’ll make with the crack. Thirty days later, I find the crack didn’t work quite like it should have (endless loop of telling me to verify then telling me I had verified), so I dig up a trusty copy of Pro, slap it on, strip out WGA and I’m done.

The moral of this story is MS had a customer with a perfectly legal copy of XP who had to go about pirating a different copy because their copy protection only affects legitimate users. Way to go assholes.

I guess the side-benefit is the machine now has “Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntu.com installed on it as well, and I’m loving it. You guys get games working under that strange OS and I can kick MS and their goofy anti(?)piracy measures to the curb. Plus if my XP install ever melts down, I can hop on the other boot-up and still use the internet.

Now to mail them a sack of poo over the Guitar Hero 2 downloadables…