O.K. thank you everyone.
I will delete all registrations except no. 6 which it says is my default or something.
As to the Windows/Unix debate wouldn't it be lovely to get into that.. perennial favourite.
My two bob's worth: I was inducted to computing via DEC's Vax and I've been around a little bit since then, in the pc world. My eternal favourite remains DEC Vax and DCL.
Next came Unix. And C. And I greatly liked them but circumstances (governments all over the world cravenly wanting only IBM machines and IBM letting Bill corner the OS market and keep it with his 'no sales, only rent' trick ) forced me into the Windows world.
And right now I'm ready to come out of it. I'm writing this on a Linux Mint machine which I'm building up to become my main work platform.
Finally bit the bullet and made the choice.
But, yep, Windows ain't so bad. It's got lots of good. And I've done thousands of hours of good work on it. But there certainly might be something peculiar to my work habits or my gear that causes my hassles.
Because the main offender has always been my Asus H170 (all my computers are custom builds) which for a couple of years has been my 'best' (highest specs) machine.
It is that machine alone that has had four system crashes in the last couple of years. That's software: system crashes, not hardware, disk crashes. Though I have had them, too. Right now I"ve got a 6 month old Western Digital 2T ex system disk from that machine that now won't mount, can't be mounted.
It's hanging off this Linux Mint machine right now waiting for me to gather the expertise and tools to copy the partition off it so's I can try recover my data and turn the disk in to WD who'll replace it.
Somehow that H170 or my software set or work practices did it in. I feel.
I'm believing in black magic, maybe? Yep, maybe.
But we'll see. I'm off to Linux Mint on a different machine and we'll see how well I go.
When I get that drive sorted out, get my data if I can, I'll get a replacement from WD and I plan to put some LInux distro on it and put it back in the H170 running it. I'll have two LInux machines then and I'll try keep them in sync and we'll see if I can't build a better future...
Dreams of former glories... the software suite I had set up about three years ago... I had everything... ah well...
