Revenge of the dead
TLDR : I hate windows (OS, not ventilation). It hates me. And it just twisted the knife.
31/07/2023 : Everything I wrote in this article is on a technical level, completely wrong. Network adapter doesn’t control your hardware (allows you to boot up from a network or something) and the problem still persists. I shall leave this as a testament to the value of sleep, as I pumped this out without any and I still haven’t solved my problem.
I shall though. And I still hate windows.
So, it has been
checks watch
a little over 6 months since I wrote anything. Yay! Or not yay.
Let’s ignore that and move on.
Moving on
My journey with computers has generally been one of a grand struggle between me wanting to do something and the computer not wanting to. From trying to play minecraft on an old desktop (but couldn’t because the bloody RAM was about 512mb. Yes, I’m kinda old. No, don’t ask) , to me trying to mine bitcoin unsuccessfully since I didn’t have the VRAM (on your GPU, and you can’t upgrade it without flinging your old laptop away for a new one) and to finally trying to run LLAMA and realising I don’t have enough RAM. Again. (Hello darkness my old friend)
But one struggle that really could only be described as condescending was my struggle with windows.
Why ? Because windows decided I was a baby, and I had to be handheld (I had to be, but that’s not the point. I wasn’t a baby).
I suppose my most infuriating moment came when I booted up my laptop to play a videogame, and had to wait for about an hour for auto updates that I had disabled (but windows so helpfully turned back on) and I wanted to fling my SDD (I just got the laptop. No fliging that) across…something.
The moment I decided to switch however, was when I tried to switch off the auto updates with a registry edit (think windows basic functions) and I got the message that I wasn’t an administrator.
Ther’s a lot of words, but I got only one. What? It’s my laptop, what are you on about?
So I decided to say screw it and go back to linux. Yes. Back. After I got my new laptop I decided I was gonna do something different (please refer to my previous blog posts for context if you’re new, have forgotten, or are not me).
But life is funny, so I was back. And now with a veangence.
So Linux it was. I deleted windows and for the past 2 years I had Linux.
Until one day……
I was getting bored of PopOS, and I wanted another distro. That’s a whole other story, but it was
NixOS > Ubuntu > and the current triple boot of Pop, Ubuntu and Nix
Pop, Ubuntu, Nix have been wonderful companions (Nix and me have a complicated relationship. I love it, it hates me. Pretty standard).
But there was one issue that had reared its ugly head. The fact that my network controller would keep disconnecting.
I would boot into any OS, and I had to pray to god that my internet worked. I didn’t have this issue for a pretty long time, but it reappeared when I started dual booting. Very rarely at first, but afer teh triple boot it became almost unbearable. About half the time I’d have to reboot to get an internet connection, and I had to read quite a bit (A tech post, so twitter. Or another story I guess)
And at the end of the day, I may have found the issue. You wanna know what it was?
The windows boot manager. Hidden away in the bloody bios, its boot order above the network interface.
How the flying fuck that affected anything is really beyond me (and I’ll try and find out and do further tests), but goddamit windows.
God. Fucking. Dammit. Windows deleted itself, but not its boot manager (obviously). It lay there, waiting for the time it could have its revenge on me for bad mouthing it all these years.
That sneaky little prick really screwed me over quite a lot. But now I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel of this ridiculous hell.
I haven’t deleted that windows boot manager yet. It’s at the bottom of the boot order,and it shall suffer till the end of time there. Completely and utterly ignored until the end of time.
Praise the omnissiah indeed. But not the windows one. Fuck that one.
