Ditching Microsoft and Google

Ditching Microsoft and Google

My main (office) PC recently died a silent upgrade death. This was the machine that ran a lot of my personal life, emails, on-line banking and purchases, Zoom, website development, photo management, and my local network. It did a lot without complaint.

My backups were not so good. Photos were fine, but documents and other files hadn't been properly backed up since around May last year. Oops. To make things worse, I'd been relying on Google to sync my browser settings and passwords across computers — except it turns out it wasn't doing that as reliably as I assumed. Lesson learned.

So I'm officially a bit annoyed at both Microsoft (endless updates) and Google (false sense of security). Older and wiser.

My solution? Well, I'm not going to buy a new computer, no Windows for sure, and definitely a different browser. I already knew Linux was an option. I'd previously booted a old notebook from a USB stick running Linux Mint xfce, and it worked well. I then dug out an old Toshiba laptop that had died upon update and been gathering dust for years, fiddled with the boot settings, and got Linux Mint Cinnamon running from USB. After a week of testing, I was confident enough to install it properly. A few disk errors made for a tedious afternoon of troubleshooting, but eventually it booted up perfectly.

I really should have stopped there. I ran some updates, noticed a restart was recommended, and thought — why not tidy up some cables at the same time?

Restarted the laptop.

Bugger… Blank Screen……