BSoD

XP on my ageing Sony Vaio is dead. Vivat Viao!

Let us call it "Day 1". On Day 1 I got a mysterious blue screen of death: it came, went & re-booted before I could even read it. Hmm, I thought, something afoot. Perhaps look into it tomorrow.

On Day 2: BSOD, the whole BSoD, nothing but the BSoD, more or less immediately. By the miracle of digital photography, I managed to photograph it before it disappeared and it grumbled about an interrupt problem - remove new hardware it suggested. Alas, no new hardware.

I swapped the two memory cards around, eliminating each in turn, in case one of those was flaky - no change.

I decided to take the hard disk out to preserve my stuff & in case the disk was at fault - this is not an easy task on a Sony, but I found a good video on YouTube - it ran for 13minutes - and it involves removing 19 screws! I put another disk in & tried reinstalling from the original disks - all went well until XP started to re-install itself, then BSoD.

Hmm, not the memory, not the hard disk - oh dear. I had a perverse idea - found the nearest set of SuSE Linux disks - 9.odd - and installed those. It worked well enough, though it was too old a version for some of the drivers needed for a 1280x800 screen, and there was no audio or wireless. Hmm.

Sent for the latest SuSE 11.2 disk & installed that - aah, perfection! It's what I'm running as I write this - and it works beautifully - knows all about the screen, the audio & wireless. It's fast & feels like a real operating system, not clunky like earlier versions.

My mate Wal reckons that Unixes hit the memory management subsystem much less than badly written Windows operating systems and based on his own practical experience this is where he thinks the problem will lie. Perhaps the Vaio's days are numbered, but for now it romps in resurgent youth guided by this sweet Linux operating system. Of course, Open Office gives me access to all the old Word and Excel files and, using the Linux Wine capability, I can even run Outlook well enough to check the data I had previously stored in it.

Feels like I can put off the evil day when I have to consider buying a new laptop running Windows 7 ;-)