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I have a lovely bride named Kelly. Kelly has a laptop, originally purchased circa 2004. Kelly’s laptop runs Windows XP Pro, which chugs along [somewhat] happily behind the little machine’s 1.8GHz celeron processor. Typically, Kelly can happily check her e-mail, sync her Palm Pilot, surf the web, manage her iPod and work on her Office documents without too much trouble. Maybe this particular Windows install was an especially stable one? Maybe her husband did a half decent job of setting up the machine before handing it over? Maybe Murphy has just chosen to smile upon her? Whatever the reason, Kelly’s laptop + XP Pro have seen her through grad school, two different jobs, all the planning for our wedding, and more.

I guess it was inevitable that things would get wonky eventually. Lately, Kelly has been clicking the “Don’t Send Error Report” button more and more frequently. Word has been crashing, and last night iTunes started acting up big time. While Kelly has been learning the virtures of frequently hitting ‘save’, I’ve been struggling to figure out what’s causing the crashing. The error messages are (as one might expect) completely unhelpful, so I’m left playing Sherlock Holmes, examining the machine’s context at the time of each crash. What else was running when the machine face-planted? Did the network have anything to do with it? Is it related only to specific files? Programs? Combinations of programs?

This is where the title of this post comes in…

With every crash, Kelly’s frusteration seems to grow. She’s definitely not new to computers, or to Windows – in fact, she shows me little tricks all the time that I never knew existed. She’s not a power user either, though… She’s not about to dive into the Windows Registry to root-cause a problem, or start poring over core dumps in hopes of finding the name of a culprit executable. She just wants a computer that works. Funny, sounds about like the rest of us.

Let’s contrast Kelly’s situation with mine. I run a slightly newer laptop, issued to me by my benevolent and caring employer. It’s a speedier machine, but that same employer bogs it down with a great deal of 3rd-party (and even some custom) software to keep Windows XP Pro happy. For home computing tasks, I boot the machine via USB, off an old 10GB 2.5″ hard drive installed in a USB drive caddy. This lets me actually enjoy what horsepower is under the hood, and lets me run the OS I actually enjoy using: Kubuntu Linux.

I’ve been using this machine this way long enough that I don’t even remember when I burned the CD and installed Kubuntu. I do remember that I performed the install before we renovated our office, which means it was December 2006 at the very latest. In that time, I can count the number of hard crashes (read: power-button reboot required) I’ve experienced on one hand. Excepting lockups due to inadvertent disconnection of the USB boot drive (which wouldn’t be a problem for nearly anyone else) I think the only cause for such a crash has been using an old version of Google Earth. Typical desktop tasks – e-mail, web browsing, document editing, iPod managing, RSS feed reading, etc. – all work flawlessly. Even some off-the-wall things I do – like connecting to my cell phone using BitPim, playing with RAW digital images from my Canon 20D, or downloading lots and lots of bittorrents in parallel – work without a hitch.

Last night, amidst assorted cursing and gnashing of teeth, we managed to find an alternative iPod manager for Kelly. Thankfully, there are dedicated Windows developers out there who happily provide some free alternatives to iTunes, and Poddoc proved to be the perfect fit. Or at least, in our case, the perfect band-aid. Eventually, something else on Kelly’s computer will break. Maybe it’ll be Office, maybe it’ll be IE, or maybe the little “Genuine Advantage” reminders (despite our copy actually being genuine) will finally get to her.

In the mean time, I’m preparing PCLinuxOS, Mepis, LinuxMint and VectorLinux discs. Because a dual-boot (read: “wean-off-Windoze”) system is appearing in my crystal ball…..