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Well, my Win XP is falling apart. The news from Dell tech support was grim–somehow my Optiplex GX150 had corrupted a crucial file, ntoskrnl.exe. If I really wanted to be safe, the technician said, I might want to reformat my hard drive, because otherwise I might lose everything. Rightly or wrongly, he said that copying over the file with a fresh one was no sure-fire guarantee, at least not if my keyboard lockups continued. Cheery words, huh? Actually they were and are. Hey, great excuse to banish Microsoft from my main box. What’s the point of XP anyway? A little over a year after the change, my system is deteriorating the same as my earlier machines did under Win 98. No more pseudo linux, I’m thinking. Give me The Real Thing. I tried TRT a few years ago but was put off by the lack of apps. This time I can look forward to goodies such as Ximian Evolution, which even comes with Red Hat 8.0.

So what does this have to do with e-books? Plenty. Luckily I’m more into plain-text e-books in the Gutenberg vein rather than commercial protected versions, but my data problem was a good example of the hassles of, say, Microsoft Reader–which of course associates your purchases with specific machines. My experience also gave me a new appreciation of the value of cracking tools to allow easy sharing of protected books on your own machines (er, fair use, that antiquated concept so loathed by the copyright establishment). Let’s hope that libararians as a group can successfully lean on e-book-related companies to be more responsive to consumers and maybe even, gasp, develop business with new publishers if the standard New York conglomerates will not wake up. The ultimate solution, of course, would be a well-stocked national digital library system like TeleRead, which, at least to an extent, would reduce the financial incentives for both piracy and consumer-hostile protection schemes.

The horrors of the weekend also reminded me of the risk of Microsoft depending on e-books to bind me and other users to Windows. I myself like the Reader’s feel–it’s much more pleasant than the competition from Adobe, and if someday Microsoft can develop a decent operating system for consumers, I’ll be back. But what’s the point of XP if it imperils my ability to get my work done? Furthermore, since I’m a much heavier user of my machine than most people are of theirs, I suspect there’ll be many more users giving up on XP in disgust as they “catch up” with me. Meanwhile I’m not sure how much blogging I can do in the next day or so, given this little distraction, courtesy Microsoft.

Confession: Yes, I’ll still have Windows on my auxiliary desktop. But I doubt I’ll be buying much right now in Microsoft Reader format–and not just because it’s incompatible .

Update, Jan. 31: Actually this item and a few others appeared a little earlier–I’ve just revived them following some Blogger-related complications.

 
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