Dead PC: It Went Up In Blue Smoke
Thought some of you Windows users MIGHT want to know about a way to recover your PC when it crashes, or when a forced update and/or malware stops it from booting.
Which it will. Since Windows is, in itself, known to be a form of malware. I'm convinced Microsoft is part of a worldwide conspiracy to kill white male Windows users.
Of course, standard advice applies, but it's the timing that counts.
"Keep a backup" is the kind of advice you give to people with high credit scores. It's not for people who come to you AFTER things crash.
When it comes time to fix something that decided to wake up dead, you won't have everything backed up. That's life. That's life in the real world.
Which is where rescue disks come in.
These might help, if you still have a DVD drive. If not, you start looking for another way.
Windows, of course, sucks. Everything it does is bloated and therefore slow. Want to make a rescue USB?
Yeah. That's when Windows really shows its inferiority.
Almost every windows recovery image for USB option requires an 8 GB thumb drive or larger. What can you do with it? Basically nothing.
So instead, one of you guys pointed me to some Linux rescue disks and I rummaged around awhile until I found this one.
What's this? Mini Windows XP? "That looks familiar enough I could recover some data."
Even better, they've got a Windows 10 version loaded with a massive amount of tools at a featherweight of less than 1 gigabyte.
Linux Also Sucks, Even When It's Great
Light, user-friendly, easy to install, quick, light. Why am I using Windows again? Oh, yeah. Because I can't install anything on Ubuntu without killing it. And its virtual machines have always been disappointing, such as lacking the GPU-accelerated pass-through you'd expect. The sound might work. If not, fixing it means installing something that might break it.
The learning curve of Linux is nightmare fuel. Even on easy mode, everything breaks.
Bye bye files. Bye, bye work. But if you value your time at a dollar an hour, or if there's a conspiracy of anti-Christs looking over your shoulder and trying to kill you, then I'd highly recommend it.
In theory, every computer system's files and settings should be fully recoverable. But life is what happens when you're installing other distros.
I don't know how people who value their time choose ANY modern operating system. I'm convinced that rich people need their own OS. And not Mac.
Because Apple is gay.
Because Apple is gay.
But sometimes Linux surprises you. Pleasantly.
Especially when it's time to take a sledgehammer to a file system and pull a few pf your babies out of the burning building of a corrupted OS.
And one of my old machines literally caught fire, too. It gave up the blue smoke and died when plugged it in, trying to find something in running condition.
A second booted and works ok, but has a failed GPU fan. It runs too hot to give me any kind of smooth experience, so I jogger-rigged another cooling fan. Only 70 degrees C? Not great, but it's better than 100.
The result: suddenly this rig plays YouTube videos nice and smoothly, dual monitor setup at tolerable working resolutions. It's not impossible to press it into service doing some audio editing, if it comes right down to that.
What this means for you guys: I'm probably not quite out of the audio and video production business quite yet, despite all the recent setbacks.
The moral to the story: There will be setbacks. Sometimes very inconvenient ones. But failure only happens when you quit.
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