We are a computer-centric household; probably 90-plus percent of our interaction with the outside world is via our various machines, or "boxes" in studly geek-speak (or "boxen", for the truly annoying geekly touch). However, all of our machines but one speak some flavor or other of Linux or FreeBSD, and there are times when a Windows box is necessary – sad but true. So we have one ancient HP Vectra sitting in the basement, its twin SCSI drives whining away like little circular saws, running Windows 2000 for those times when we must call on the dark powers of Microsoft.

Recently I picked up a slightly less ancient Compaq machine at a garage sale (thirty five bucks!) as a potential replacement for the 7- or 8-year-old Vectra. It had twice the memory (but still not enough!) and four times the processor speed, a DVD-RW drive, a CD drive, a hard drive which purred rather than whined, a monitor whose red electron gun wasn't shot, and spiffy speakers (Age of Empires! In stereo! Finally!). The box came with Windows ME installed; I rolled my eyes – I scoff at your pathetic consumer-oriented operating system! Hah! – reformatted the drive and put on Win2K (as we studly geeks call it).

Reboot, and up comes the familiar desktop, but really grainy because it's in 640x480 pixel resolution. Hmmm, tweak the video settings – wait, the graphics card isn't recognized at all. What's up with that? This machine isn't that new. I have no idea what kind of graphics card it has. Pop in the Kubuntu disc (thank God for live discs!), reboot off that, and read off what Kubuntu thinks the card is – an S3 Savage4 – then pop the CD out, reboot into Windows, and go searching for S3 drivers for Win2K – web surfing at 640x480 resolution is not a pleasant experience, btw.

Find the drivers, download them, try to install – the machine doesn't recognize them as drivers at all. A dialog box blandly informs me, "No drivers for this device found." But I downloaded them direct from S3's site! Step away from the computer. Go outside. Hack at unruly yard vegetation.

I think, let's try this again, methodically. Slowly. Re-install the whole bleeding OS, then realize maybe it needs to be patched and upgraded first, before it will accept the Offering of the Drivers. Install Win2K. Reboot. Install Win2K Service Pack 4. Reboot. Install Windows Update. Reboot. Install many, many patches. Reboot. Re-visit S3's website, discover tool that detects graphics card version. Neat! Download. Install. Reboot. It's not a "Savage4", it's a "SavagePro". Download the SavagePro drivers. Install. Reboot. Hold breath, and – 1280x768 pixels! Obstacle overcome!

Now, install all the necessary software: Internet Explorer (or, as us geekly types call it, "Internet Exploder". Get it? "Exploder"!! Ha ha! We kill us, sometimes). Reboot. Acrobat PDF reader (reboot). The VPN client (reboot). Finally, just because of those spiffy stereo speakers and the DVD writer, I installed the iTunes client, and of course I then (all together now) rebooted.

Or at least I tried. The first half, the shutdown part, went ok. But the second half, where the disks spin and the lights blink and you end up with a working computer? Not so much. The Win2K splash screen came up, and the little blue progress bar made it about 2/3rds of the way across the screen – then silence. For a long, long time. After 10 minutes, I pushed the button, and tried again, hoping that we could just ignore that little faux pas, just pretend it never happened. But no, the computer stopped and sat there, sphinx-like, at the same point.

Now I remembered the other main thing I hated about Windows; its smug, superior attitude vis-a-vis the person sitting at the keyboard. With a UNIXy box, there would have probably been a screenful of text, some last dying cries for help sent out by the kernel as it vainly attempted to cope with some hardware or software malfunction, cries that would at least lend a bit of diagnostic help – but here, in Windowsland, nothing. It is not for you to know why I cannot boot, stupid little end-user! It is enough for you to know that I shall not.

Yes, yes, I tried 'safe mode', 'debugging mode', even 'command-line' mode. Sometimes it froze before the splash screen, sometimes during it. Other than that, no difference. I'm guessing it may have been a hard drive error – this household seems to be prone to them – so I broke out the diagnostic utilities disk and am now running the painstaking, many-hours-to-finish tests on the hard drive, then I'll run the painstaking, many-hours-to-finish tests on the memory chips, more for something to do than anything else. If it's not the hard drive, or maybe the memory, I don't really know what else to check – I guess there's the "jiggle all the cables" technique. But there's a limit on how much effort I want to put into a $35 machine. A $35 Windows machine.