i've had it

That's it. I quit, I'm throwing in the towel, I just can't take it anymore. I'm going over to the dark side -- I bought a Mac.

Windows has driven me to it. I've seen the Blue Screen of Death once too many times.

My computer woes began in the summer, when my computer's performance gradually began to deteriorate. Now, I'm by no means one who needs top performance from a computer. It's not like my usual habits involve much more than Word, the internet and occasionally Starcraft or Civ 3. But by the fall, it was the basic functions that weren't doing their thing anymore. I don't think it's too much to ask that it take less than 10 minutes to boot up. And that it take less than 10 minutes to shut down -- that is, when it shuts down at all. And programs randomly seem to just stop working -- for no apparent reason, they just won't start up. And also for no apparent reason, sometimes they start working again after a while. And then there's the crashing. The repeated, persistent crashing, followed each time by the 10 minute reboot, of course.

I tried to fix this. But two reformattings, one hardware diagnostics check, and several registry cleanings later, I quit. Reformatting made no difference (and it was a 2-day operation each time); according to the diagnostics the hardware is all working perfectly; cleaning Windows registry was useless.

I've had a couple of suggestions of other things to try, but none of them seem likely to make any difference. I'm not investing any more time into this, especially as it seems likely I'll be back doing it again in a few months anyway. Enough of this garbage.

Windows is dead; long live Mac OS X.