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Our laptop just died.

I’m actually quite surprised it lasted as long as it did, considering that it has been running Windows Me for more than two years now. Windows Me, in my not-at-all-humble opinion, was without question the worst operating system Microsoft ever made. So why did we use it, you ask? That’s a fair question. 

When we moved to Kanagawa a couple years ago, we decided to switch to ADSL (which was just then starting to become available in areas outside the big city, even though it’s everywhere now) to save on the horrendous cost of dial-up access. The modem provided by our ISP at the time required Windows 98SE or later for configuration purposes. At that time, there were no copies of 98SE available on the market, but there were plenty of copies of either Windows Me or Windows 2000. I bought the upgrade version of Windows 2000 first, thinking that it would be the better choice, but could never get it to install—even though Microsoft’s own compatibility wizard indicated that it would be no problem. 

Reluctantly, after several fruitless attempts to install Windows 2000, I went back to the store to get a copy of Me. Fortunately, the points I had left over from the purchase of Windows 2000 were enough to get Me for only 501 yen—which was still a whole lot more than Me was really worth. Upon getting home from the store, however, the Me installation was relatively painless, so we decided to live with it.

When Windows XP came out, I discovered that there would be no way for our little 233MHz/128MB laptop to run an operating system as resource-hungry as XP, so another upgrade was out of the question (besides, I already had serious reservations about Microsoft’s latest offering for other reasons). So, again, we decided to live with Me, although we weren’t terribly happy about it.

Recently, though, Me has started acting up. A lot. Much worse than usual. Tonight, after a long battle against the inevitable, Windows Me suffered a major aneurism and has become a complete vegetable, so I’m left with little choice but to pull the plug on this patient.

The time of death was 9:10 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 29, 2004. Goodnight, Me, may you find peace in oblivion.

Fortunately, all of the hardware on the laptop seems to be in good working condition. I’ve run Knoppix and Knoppix knock-off Berry Linux from the CD-ROM drive with no trouble at all. With any luck, we should be able to transplant a new brain in the laptop that will allow it to enjoy life after Me. 

The only question right now is which flavor of Linux to choose. Fedora Core builds on Red Hat 9, which I use on my desktop, so it’s already familiar. SUSE plans to enter the Japanese market later this year, and I’ve been hoping to give it a try. I’ve heard good things about Gentoo’s Japanese support, but is it easy enough for my wife, who doesn’t care much for computers and technology in general? In the few times that she’s used the desktop machine, she hasn’t been happy with the default IME, which is admittedly not intuitive. I haven’t tried installing ATOK X for a while, but that might take care of her IME worries. Suggestions welcome.

I’m not sure if I will be able to find Linux drivers for some of my peripherals, though, so as of right now I’ve got a CanoScan FB 620U flatbed color scanner and a Fujitsu 640USB3 MO drive (and several 640MB MO disks!) for sale, along with a few other Windows-only devices, if anyone cares to make an offer on them.