After reboot and a glass of wine with some mozzarella and dry baguette, I try again – click on the tour in the three choices screen. Same black, dead screen with an apple. Now what? I am ready to give it a whack this time, but wait, if I punish the Apple, I will have to go back to SuSE that had been killed by Novel. This is not good.

Another reboot, wine, mozzarella and some green olives and we have a plan. Try the software update. Yep, there are updates for all three components of iWork ‘08. Install the update, more wine and water. This time we are going to press on “try” instead of taking a hike with a black screen. After obligatory legal button presses it all goes slooooooow. I can not even select anything from the dock. My Mac has been reduced to the standard WIntel. I can not take it anymore! I will donate my Mac mini to the garbage man. That is it!

I got my cousin’s laptop working thanks to the power of KNOPPIX.

Win XP SP2 installed OK on Dell Inspiron 600m after reformatting the second partition. First is occupied by Dell Diagnostics. Everything is fine, but where is the Internet. There was an ugly yellow question mark next to the Ethernet device. Tried to reinstall one from XP disk. Nothing happened. Now what? Obviously, I did not have the original Dell CD shipped with the laptop. This would be to easy. I am also too old to play the Microsoft driver charade. They want me to connect to the Internet to get the driver that will fix the broken Internet. It looks like a paradox. Not if you have the KNOPPIX CD and know some Linux.

Here is the solution.

Boot with the KNOPPIX CD. Open terminal window. Execute “lspci” to get the list of all adaptor model numbers and manufacturers (in my case Ethernet adaptor was Broadcom Tigon3). Open the browser (the Internet works in Linux without any hunting for stinking drivers). Go to Dell.com, search for Inspiron 600m driver downloads. Download the correct driver. Reboot to WinXP. Install the downloaded driver. Done. Not yet.

Next we have to go trough the mandatory agony of the Windows Update. Even when set to automatic update, after all automatic updates have been installed, there are more updates to be installed.

After two days of of work, I am glad that I do not have to do that often. I do not feel sorry for the people that put up with this nonsense, they deserve it. If you want my advice, there is an easier way – buy Mac. But, you say – all of my friends are using MS Windows. I say – get new, smarter friends.

KNOPPIX is a bootable, live Linux system made by Klaus Knopper.

You can read more about it at http://knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html .

Download it, burn it and it works like magic. Put it in any computer with a CD drive and you are good to go. It does not mater what or if an operating system is installed on that computer. The KNOPPIX CD is live, self contained and it will run even if the hard drive is damaged, hence I use it to fix broken computers.