Dullroar

A couple months ago, I switched my laptop from a dual-boot Linux/Windows setup to a full-time Windows XP setup with a Linux virtual machine (provided through CoLinux, natch). I've been all set to write up the story of how happy I am in this world: suspend/resume work flawlessly, I have access to Google desktop search and Picasa, and dual-head monitor support finally works. Even my old favorites, Firefox, Thunderbird and Gaim, were there, and they seem to work better under Windows. And with CoLinux, I can still develop natively on Linux, which is what my research requires, without having to reboot.

So great, right? Well, no. My setup is unstable as all hell. I wind up rebooting after a hard crash about twice a week. The problem? All the little helper apps and features I use play really poorly together. Today I had a crash while moving a window between my laptop's screen and an external monitor (running at a different resolution) such that the window passed under a semi-transparent sticky note (ATnotes is the app I use for that). That's when everything went dark.

Ok, who do I blame? XP, obviously. I might also be to blame for having such an odd setup, but I can't decide whether that's me bravely facing reality or whether it's a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome. And more important than who to blame, how do I fix it? Possibly it's time to go back to Linux. Or maybe I should stick with my (abusive) relationship with Windows, and try to get some work done without pissing it off too much. I dunno.

Fine print: I'm running XP service pack 2 on a Thinkpad X30 with an Intel graphics chipset that obviously blows goats. Under Linux, suspend/resume has never worked right on this machine with either Fedora Core 1 or Core 2, using either APM or ACPI. Finally, anyone who tells me that I should really get a Mac, please first ponder the fact that, while Linux and OS X are both Unix-like, they're actually quite different for the sort of work I do, which requires working with a bunch of kernel interfaces. And don't even try to sell me on Mac Linux, which seems like an even less reliable alternative, and one with the wrong endianness at that. Also, Macs are expensive and, I hear, break a lot. Despite all that, I obviously want one but hate myself for it. Sigh.