Just when I was stumped by Windows … it throws me the ultimate curveball, Blue Screen of Death.

I was just trying (struggling more like it) to get Windows and my RoR environment to play nice (I’m using the Aptana Studio IDE, two thumbs up!) when the screensaver hangs. Yup you read right … the basic, stock, default screensaver hung the stock Windows XP installation. I had just recently gotten fed up with Internet Explorer (crashed without saving all my tabs … which Firefox doesn’t do) and switched over to Firefox, so maybe this was Windows being vindictive and trying to get even with me.

Upon reboot … BSOD! Something about my usb drivers are acting up and they are causing Windows to fail. WTH? Reboot … BSOD! Your volume is unmountable. WTF? That’s the last straw … I need to rescue my data from that Windows machine. The best solution I can think of is to boot with a Linux Live CD, re-mount the “unmountable” partition and back everything up to my iMac. I have half a mind to then install something more suitable on the machine, so that I can at least continue using it comfortably.

The best part is … I was previously using my wife’s 2006 15inch Core2 Duo MBP, running an older version of Mac OS X (10.4). And it was smooth sailing for me for the past 5 months, never a hardware issue, never a hiccup. And this Windows machine was the office-supplied one, I’ve only been using it for about 2 weeks. Someone asked me what I thought of the new machines, I replied “meets expectations”. They were surprised and said, “Only that?”. Dayum if only this incident happened before they asked, I could have pointed them to this blog post haha.

Windows 0, Mac OS X 1. Good Game to you, sir.