Thursday, May 03, 2007

Internet Explorer 7 just decided to steal a day of my life......

Fuck Microsoft and their shitty computers.

See, I should just leave the post there, but it's late at night and my mind is finally waking up and my fingers are doing a little dance across the keys and they wont stop dancing till I tell you what happened.
(And no, I'm not on the gin yet. Yet.)

About midday yesterday, one of the ICT suite machines decided that it didn't like the internet anymore. No idea why, just packed up and wouldn't play anymore. None of the other machines are affected, even though they're all set up the same way.
Granted this is the machine I tend to use to test stuff on to see if it works, but surely that alone isn't going to mess up IE7 that much?

Anyway, thinking it's a software issue I try to do a quick system restore to make it work again. But it seems that system restore is screwed up as well, something quite common with IE7 faults from what I read on the internet using the machine next to the messed up one.
(Which, as an side, is what you should always have when you have problems with your computer. A second, fully functioning pc, capable of doing websearches using terms like ie7 is rubbish?).

Eventually, after a bit of trouble and a couple of refusals, IE7 is removed from the system leaving me with IE6. Which seems to work perfectly.
Except for minor little niggles and crashes. Which is another thing I read about online; the tendency for IE7 to fuck up your system even after it's been uninstalled.

Mess around, install, uninstall.
Repeat. many times.
Go home.

Today I spent about 3 hours messing with it again and finally managed to reinstall it so it works.
See, if I was a proper ICT professional I'd have just reinstalled XP and had done with it.
But I'm not and I got a perverse sense of satisfaction from messing around with it.

Of course, on the plus side, I did download and start using Firefox and Opera as well. From what I can see so far after a bit of tinkering I think Firefox is nice, but seems a little slower than IE7.
But Opera is the revelation. Fast, trim and very nice to look at.
And packed with loads of little extras, widgets to play around with. Me being me, the calender and the to do list widget are already in use.

After this latest bit of Microsoft fuckery I really am looking at the possibilities of living an MS free life.
Linux for an OS.
Open Office for software.
Opera for internet.
But when in gods name will I actually have the time to play around with Linux, having never touched it before.
I really need to get a couple of days free to get hold of one of the spare old pcs in the ICT suite cupboards and see if I can't load it onto them.
Any ideas about which Linux release to go for and any advice about how to do it would be much appreciated.

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