Turn a Windows User Into a Linux User

I had a friend complaining to me about BSOD's. Well I gave my usual speech about what they are and such and offered to analyze them. I pointed him in the path of a utility from Nirsoft, BlueScreenView and he sent me the results. I let him know that most likely it was a driver issue and maybe he could update. I also had given him a USB flash drive with Linux Mint Katya on it and low and behold I received an email that night that he had wiped Windows 7 away and was enjoying Linux.

He had one real issue and that was finding the right wireless driver. Once he connected wired, the driver was downloaded and installed along with other updates and all was well.

Tux clipart
from Clker.com

Chalk another one up for the penguins.

Help For BSOD's In A Tiny Package

This post has been moved to Working With Windows.

Stop: 0X000000D1

I powered on my laptop to Windows XP a few days ago. I really haven't been using it with Windows lately preferring Fedora 11. But I had to do some banking and I have yet to move stuff to Linux in this area yet. I still want more experience with the OS before I commit this information. So on this night I logged into the bank and did what I needed to do. No problems with that. I'm logged in and I might as well check out the web and see what's going on tonight. Then it hit. At first my connection slowed to a crawl and I thought I was getting pegged by malware. So I ran a scan but it came up empty. Then I went back to surf some more but nothing would open. I pinged a site and that was okay so I re-booted the router. Still nothing. It was then that the dreaded blue screen appeared. Stop: 0X000000D1, IRQ_not_less_equal. Believe it or not but this was the very first blue screen I have ever had with this laptop. Needless to say I was a bit bummed and confirmed to myself that this is why I am going to Linux. Any way the stop error referenced the NDIS driver and I knew exactly what to do. Yesterday I finally got around to downloading the driver update from Dlink and I installed it today.No more BSOD and I'm running it right now. It is always puzzling as to why after all this time, hundreds of hours in use, the driver decided to go south. I haven't even used it except about twice a week lately to do my banking. This is just one of those Windows mysteries that hopefully Microsoft will improve with Windows 7. I admit I have been really lucky about blue screens with this laptop. I just can't figure out what happened. Well for me anyway, I will continue on my quest to learn Linux better and eventually do my banking on it too.

One of the most famous and funniest BSOD's of all time.