Okay, so I don’t hate Microsoft. That said, I am incredibly annoyed with them. 3 hours on telephone support and counting…but more on this in a bit.

3 years ago, I decided I was done with blue screens of death, viruses and technology that was 2-3 years behind the competition. I also decided I was cheap, so I jumped to Linux (eventually decided on Ubuntu). Over the years, I’ve had my ups and downs with Linux.  My first installation of Red Hat wouldn’t recognize my wireless card, and after 2 hours of trying to figure out the command line, I decided I would simply try another distro.

So Suse it was, and by virtue of their glorious developers, my wireless worked! I played around with it, but had a hell of a time figuring out how to install any programs.  I’m a smart guy, and it just wasn’t intuitive coming from a Windows environment.  After a few weeks of messing around, I came across Ubuntu and didn’t look back.  All of my hardware was detected, and I didn’t have to go scrounging for drivers.

And for 3 years, I was happy. From time to time, we would fight, but things were more or less domestically blissful. Problems began bubbling up in the last few releases, and finally my graphics card was no longer supported by AMD or Xorg.  Full screen videos were unbearably choppy, and lets face it, How I Met Your Mother, Community, 30 Rock and Sunny are NOT going to be watched in some tiny window.

So I decided to jump back to Microsoft and see what the raving about Windows 7 was about.  So I installed,  and prayed. Turns out that Linux has a better installation process, it turns out that Microsoft doesn’t recognize my wireless and  it turns out they don’t recognize my video card. No drivers are available from Broadcom and none from ATI. Fail.

So I’ve officially returned to Windows XP, so that I can enjoy hardware accelerated video. And what a pain it has been. Microsoft doesn’t recognize any of my hardware, so it meant spending over an hour trying to find all the most recent drivers to use, and it also meant trying to activate my “genuine” Microsoft product. Just my luck, my product key no longer works (for god knows what reason) and I’ve spent the last 3 hours on hold with my favorite ex.  Oddly, I miss the ease of use of Linux and can only anticipate returning after upgrading my hardware (eventually).

*update* Microsoft finally provided me with a new Product Key that worked. What a pain.