Well, I've transitioned from Windows 10 back to Linux on my main computer. I still have Windows 10 installed on another hard drive if I want to boot into it for something, but I haven't done much on my computer that strictly required Windows for quite awhile now. My wife has talked about using Linux instead of Windows on her Laptop since she's read about privacy issues with Windows so I investigated a few distros and ended up switching myself. This also saves me the need of hunting down which shell extension in my Windows setup causes Windows Explorer to hang every so often. (Not Internet Explorer which wouldn't be a big deal, but Windows Explorer which means the desktop stops responding and is pretty annoying).

I looked the various desktops that aren't real weird or primitive: KDE 5, Gnome, Unity, Cinnamon, Mate, Xfce, Pantheon, and Lxde. I thought I'd end up using a beta of the latest Ubuntu with Gnome updated to the very latest, but I'm liking Cinnamon better. It looks like my copy of MS Office 2007 will run okay on Linux with wine, but so far I haven't found a need to use it with what I do. I have the latest version of Libreoffice installed and it seems to have come a good ways since the last time I used it.

My computer now looks kinda like a hybrid between a Mac and Windows 7. [link]

Anyhow, so far so good.

I killed the thread with Linux. Sorry.

For fun go to your command line and issue the trace route command for the domain name 'bad.horse', upping the max hops to 60 or so.

Linux> traceroute -m 60 bad.horse

Windows> tracert -h 60 bad.horse

Mac> traceroute -m 60 bad.horse

Then wait for it... I love geeks.

Aww...

Hah.

Hah, indeed.

So, I've got something weird happening on my media machine. It's a six year old Win 7 machine that I set up a year and a half ago with an SSD boot drive and two large hard drives. Today when I went to boot it up, I got a "Loading Windows XP" splash screen, then a blue screen o' death followed by an instant reboot. Multiple reboots produce variations of the same thing. The thing is, the Win 7 installation was wasn't an upgrade. There shouldn't be any Win XP boot detritus, right?

I filmed one of the boot failures to capture the BSOD as it zipped by, but it was generic message, without any error info. I suspect that it must be a problem with the SSD, but it's showing up in the post sequence.

I tried doing a repair from an install disk, but no joy. I'm still getting the same routine. Any thoughts?

For fun go to your command line and issue the trace route command for the domain name 'bad.horse'

I will be posting this elsewhere...

I have zero Windows help, but hi DX!!

Hi meara!

So, this morning I started diagnosing, after first checking to make sure that it still was booting to an XP splash screen. It was. So I opened up the box and started disconnecting things to try to isolate the bad actor. I disconnected the two storage drives, then booted up with just the SSD, and lo, there was a Win 7 splash screen and then the desktop a few seconds later. Knowing the SSD was good, I then reconnected the 3 TB media drive, and that worked. So I figured that it must be the last drive (500 GB) that was problematic. But when I reconnected that one, it worked, too. WTF?!?

The upshot is that the machine is working again simply by virtue of unplugging and replugging two hard drives, which makes little sense. This is why I hate computers.

It wasn't all for nought. I'd picked up a 4 TB drive a little while back for an upgrade, so as long as the machine is opened up, I might as well install it.