Tuesday, July 15, 2008

This Happened to Me

Last week, a Windows update caused me to lose all Internet connectivity. No, I take that back. The connection was fine, but I couldn't get online.

Called tech support, and the first thing he asked was "Are you running Zone Alarm?". Of course I am, so he tells me to disable it. I do, and wham! the Internets are up all over.

It seems that update caused it to happen. I wasn't getting any alerts from ZA, of course, so I have to disable it for all my computers.

Well, the good folks at ZA have addressed it, but now I'm going to address it:

Microsoft, I'm through with you. There's a Mac (or two) in my future. I started with Apple, and I have no problems going back.

It's been fun, I've really enjoyed buying all kings of video upgrades, memory sticks and audio stuff to keep up with your "improvements", but now I'll just put all that money into a Mac and be done with it.

I think Gates got out at the right time.

.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Heck yeah. I got tired of them and switched to Linux. Never going back now. Free operating system that's more stable. Free open-source office applications that function just as well.

Unfortunately, there will always be $300 PCs at your local Wal-Mart initiating newbies into the world of Vista.

the pistolero said...

I love my MacBook. It's about twice the price of a comparably-equipped Windows laptop, but it's more than worth it.

NotClauswitz said...

The exact same thing happened to me, ZoneAlarm finally fixed it, but still.
Next machine I'm moving to Linux, Apple is a bit tooo much precious around here, a close friend works at Red Hat.

Rustmeister said...

Yeah, I may go the Linux route, it all depends on money and motivation (or lack thereof) to figure out Linux.

Anonymous said...

Since you have a Wintel box sitting there, you should give Linux a try. It's easy and free, and you can do it without installing it, or overwriting your HD.

It's the magic of the "Live CD", and you can get them in several flavors. Download the ISO, burn the CD, and boot from it. The only downside is it's a little slower, since it's running from the CD.

You can also do a dual-boot setup, which will get you the speed of real install, and let you switch back to Windoze for various things, until you get comfortable living 100% in Linux.

Personally, I recommend giving Kubuntu a try. It's a variant of Ubuntu, using the K Desktop Environment (KDE) instead of the Gnome Desktop Environment. Lots of people really like Gnome, but I much prefer the greater degree of control and configurability of KDE.

But there's Live CDs from Fedora and SuSUE, to name just a couple others.

But really, I highly recommend going to one of the Ubuntu flavors, because package management (meaning installs/upgrades) is totally slick and easy with those.

I've been using Linux as my primary home OS for 10 years. I'm trying to remember when I completely kicked Windoze out -- I think about 7 years ago.

I won't knock Apple -- I have friends who absolutely Luuuuuuuuurve their Macs. But hey, Linux is free, and you already own the hardware that runs it.