The Wast has now gone down in family history as a major destroyer of communal assets. We always thought that Little Dinosaur would hold that honour (hence her other nickname of ‘Shiva’) but, not willing to be outdone, The Wast came through by destroying not one, but two, of our computers. We treat our computers a bit like furniture — we move them around, load different systems, tweak things here and there, as the mood and circumstance grab us. So one of the fallen computers was mine, then was used as the family server, then went to being the family gaming machine, then fell into neglect, before being resurrected for TW. And he thrashed the disks. At the end, all you could hear on boot-up was a small whine followed by a clunk, and you could just imagine those heads balefully looking out over all that platter space they had to seek and giving up hope. It was rather sad.

So we moved him to another machine, which had gone through a similar timeline, and he burnt out the CPU, although the disk remained intact. This is important and will come in handy later. (He’s tough on computers and both of them were, admittedly, getting a little long in the tooth. That’s 8 years old, in case anyone was wondering.)

Well, we did the only thing you could do under the circumstances — we built him a new computer. This one was not as highly spec’ed as Monster, with only a 2.4GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM, 460GB of new hard disk, a graphics card, DVD burner, all in a shiny black case with 3 transparent sides and bling (blue neon fans and transparent blue power supply with UV switches. Yum). TW can add more bells and whistles with his own pocket money if he wishes.

While I am adamant that every system in the house will eventually run on Linux, J is a bit more sanguine about Windows and we had no guarantees that TW’s favourite games would play under Linux, Wine or no Wine. So, the expedient decision was made to use the Windows license from one of the thrashed machines and load it on the new machine until I had completed my appropriate knowledge-gathering of Wine (a Windows emulator that runs under Linux) and its capabilities.

And everything went swimmingly … until we tried to activate our copy of Windows XP. For which, I may add, we had a legitimate license. Now, before I continue, I have to say that I know that data from Windows machines are uploaded to the great Windows servers around the world. In this way, they can track who has, and hasn’t, legitimate copies of software running on their machines. I also know there are ways around this but, to be honest, it’s just too much of a hassle for me, and I’d prefer to just buy a machine every now and then with an installed copy of the hole-ridden poxy software and be done with it. (Which is how we got our first of a handful of legitimate licenses.)

As a Linux supporter, you can imagine how I felt when our legitimate, single-user, version of purchased software threw up a message that we had activated Windows “too many times”. The air was rent blue with amazing conjugations and much descriptive prose, and I left it to J to call the Microsoft help desk to get the problem sorted it. He did so and was treated like a criminal as he tried to explain, three times, that no, he didn’t have one version of XP simultaneously loaded on several machines … XP had been loaded on three machines successively, and we were now on our third machine, the other two having self-destructed in quiet desperation. (I paced angrily. “Check your servers, you £*%%s! You know we don’t have multiple versions running.” Which is a bit unfair, because I doubt the average Helpdesk person has access to that kind of information, and I’ve worked in Support and know just how rude irate customers can get. To my credit, I was only muttering it in the background in the next room, not screaming it into the phone’s mouthpiece.)

Eventually, J must have convinced somebody of his innate honesty, because we were charitably given The Activation Code and we completed activation … followed by days of installing patch after patch (2,500 of them! I kid you not … download-install-reboot, download-install-reboot), followed by the essential anti-virus and firewall software.

Now, is there any other industry other than ones associated with electronic rights, that treats its customers so shabbily? The “too many activations” message is not one that was displayed after careful cross-checking against both database and usage statistics. No, it comes up when an edition has been installed multiple times, period. No verification required. It stopped us dead in our tracks until we pleaded our case to a complete stranger who had it within her power to withhold the code, and thus usage of something we had legitimately purchased, on an arbitrary whim. Guilty until proven innocent.

Forget good faith. Hell, if there was any element of “good faith” in the transaction whatsoever, Microsoft should be paying us for risking our precious personal data with such a sloppy, inelegant, resource-hogging, insecure pile of steaming code masquerading as an operating system. I’m moving as fast as I can on the Wine investigations … I just wish there were more hours in the day.

UPDATE: Once Little Dinosaur saw how much fun The Wast was having on his new computer, she wanted to know where her computer was. So I dug out another of my old laptops (if you work in IT, you tend to accumulate laptops), scavenged the hard disk from one of TW’s previous little full-contact performance testing bouts (100GB’s worth, no less!) and loaded Edubuntu on it. The tagline for Edubuntu is “Linux for Young Human Beings”. Awwwww. We named her machine PrettyPony and she loves it. TW’s is, of course, named DarthVader.