Yesterday I wasted two hours of my life. A friend of mine asked me to help his mother-in-law with her computer (Windows XP). A year ago I set up that computer for her; she uses Open Office, surfs the net and writes e-mail, and she'd like to be able to use Skype and her sound card to video-chat with her grandchildren.

Sound on her system is not working. Part of her chipset fails to be supported. Probably as a result of that the system is awfully slow. According to Process Explorer...

Hardly a day passes without someone posting a blog or forum post or whatever claiming that either now Linux is so easy a complete newbie with no prior knowledge [usually abbreviated as 'Grandma'] can use it, or the opposite. I won't link to any such post here, you've all seen examples and will continue to see them for all eternity.

Here's some news for the people who write such posts: using a computer to its full potential without prior knowledge and without acquiring relevant knowledge...

Here's something I just noted while working with Ubuntu 7.10 and a Win XP I still need for three programs I use frequently at work, namely Corel Draw, Dreamweaver and our ERP software.

Ubuntu by itself will run within 150 MB on my machine, which is equipped with 1.5 GB of RAM. The remaining RAM is marked as 'free' by gkrellm, though I realize that this doesn't mean it's not used as cache or buffer; but it is available for programs as they get started. Swap space is completely unused....

Seems I'm not the only one who got reeled into this by the most recent newsletter. Why is it we feel compelled to start blogging all of a sudden even though some of us might never have done so before? I sure haven't.

Anyway, on the off-chance anyone is really reading this, I'm Robin from Germany. Fighting windmills as the IT scapegoat in a small German company.

One such windmill presented itself just today, so that's probably why I am using this new chance to vent....