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How the Microsoft invasion works

Had a user want to switch their box across from Ubuntu to MS-Windows today, & they were annoyed when a supplier wanted to charge them $300.00 for the trouble & looked for “the original CDs.”

It turned out that the PC was perfectly fine, but that the little, old (~15 years) switch plugging the whole lot together had died. Not only died, but shut down the PC’s ethernet card as well. Oh, & the ADSL router’s interface.

Plugging the PC direct into the ADSL router, factory-resetting that & rebooting the PC made it all work again... except that neither the VoIP ’phone interface nor the wireless router (needed to reach another user’s laptop) can talk until the switch is replaced.

So... why did the user want to put MS-Windows in?

AFAICT, because that’s all the technician they called in understood, & they’d been told by someone else that MS-Windows was the only good thing.

The someone else had said it partly to cause me trouble, & partly because, according to friends of theirs in turn, it is the only good thing to run a PC on (because — in essence — it’s the only thing they understand even slightly & they really like looking commanding & knowledgeable rather than like a complete clown).

It does look more & more like that cr4ppy coding was done first to make it look easy to use & get them “wired in” rather than for any sensible reasons like reliability, security, portability, name it. The networking that Microsoft succeeds at is basically social networking, & “succeeds” is a misnomer because the users are being led astray (in essence, lied to) in order to make the networking effective.

Thank you, I’d prefer to be honest & straightforward.

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