After spending seven - yes, that’s right seven - hours trying to reconstruct the Windows XP Pro OEM CD that should have come with my laptop (an Acer TravelMate 4060 which has, generally speaking, been a fine machine), I finally got the thing working.

Then I ran Windows Update (after installing all of the necessary drivers, software, etc.).

Now it hangs on one of my Bluetooth drivers - btkrnl.sys.

Renaming the file doesn’t help. No, starting Windows from the “last good configuration” doesn’t help. Recovery didn’t help.

So now I’m installing XP again. And the software will soon follow. And it’s almost 3am.

The upshot? I’m done with Windows. The next computer I purchase will be a Mac. I don’t care about whatever hardware problems they’re having - it can’t be worse than this. The amount of time I have to spend trying to keep XP from %$#!ing up my life/work/career/music/hobbies/research has now greatly exceeded maximum density. So I’m purchasing a Mac as soon as I can afford to do so (read: “after graduate school”). That, and I’m creating new partitions and installing Ubuntu on all my PCs in an effort to slowly wean myself from Microsoft’s teat.

I could tell you the entire saga – about the time I was up until 2:30am the night before a presentation, trying to get XP to install printer drivers so I could produce the last two slides I needed. Or the countless XP machines I used to run into (when I actually did this kind of thing for a living – Microsoft has done much to encourage me to study hard and get into graduate school so that I could avoid its products as much as possible) which were full of malware (I attribute this development to Microsoft too, as it was their brilliant decision to integrate Internet Explorer with the rest of the Windows operating system), or running with hosed – that’s a technical term, folks: “hosed” – registries (the system registry being one of the worst ideas in the history of the personal computer; right up there with raw sockets on new Windows installations).

Of course, a lot of this could be due to my ineptitude. And no, I couldn’t design a better operating system – but then I’m not responsible for the #1 computing platform in the world and charging $300 a pop for my software, now am I?

OK, so I should have created a full backup when my laptop arrived – that was my fault (although I will say that Microsoft’s licensing structure has gotten completely ridiculous – if you don’t believe me, check out the four editions of Vista you can own, one copy per PC, not to be moved more than once). But overall, if I were able to get back all the hours of my life I have spent troubleshooting the problems created by the collective ineptitude in Redmond, Washington, I would probably have another week to work on my thesis introduction …which was why I was so intent on getting the laptop working before leaving for Georgia on Wednesday.

Sadly, I don’t think Bill will offer to reimburse me for my time.

Goodbye, Microsoft. And good riddance.