Over the weekend I decided to do something I had vowed I wouldn’t do: reinstall Windows on my PC. Before the Linux zealots out there collapse in a gasping heap of unbelief at this, let me explain that this was to be a dual-boot scenario, with Kubuntu as my primary OS still.

First, some background. I had, against my better judgment, installed some software into Kubuntu that was not only not from any of the Kubuntu repositories, it was also rather bleeding edge. Unfortunately, the edge bled over into some of my Kubuntu-approved software, notably Firefox. Frequent crashes ensued; reinstallations didn’t help.

If you’ve ever tried to go through a system and remove a single piece of software, you know that it can sometimes be tricky to find every last file that said software installed. Doing this for several packages, however, becomes an exercise in frustration, so I usually just do a quick system reinstall to save time. Since my /home partition is on completely separate drives from /, it isn’t a particularly difficult or harrowing task.

The other part of my decision — and here’s where I got myself into trouble — involved the idea that I should probably have Windows available, even if not for full-time use. I’ve tried the whole virtual machine thing and it’s fine for casual use, but if you really need to use a printer that the VM won’t allow Windows to see, then there’s a problem.

Fine. I have plenty of gigs of free space on my system drive, so let’s install Windows. The installation went fine, much quicker than I expected, actually, but then came the part I had forgotten about. I had to install patches and drivers and codecs (oh my!). After rebooting about 100 times, I finally had a Windows system that could do… nothing. Now I had to install all those useful little pieces of software that make the PC more than a glorified power-hungry doorstop. The installs went on and on, from Acrobat Reader to Flash. Fine, no big deal. After hours of reconfiguration I finally had a working system, so I began surfing the Web.

SLOOOOWWWWW! Everything took forever. Booting the system took forever. Actually, using the typical Windows Lie, I got a desktop much faster than I do with Kubuntu, but I couldn’t do anything when I got there. It’s impossible to click the Start button to start software until the system is fully ready to go, which took seemingly forever.

I had previously experienced this effect on people’s shiny new Windows Vista machines, but I’d forgotten that Windows XP suffers exactly the same problem. Windows just isn’t ready for the desktop yet. Maybe in another few versions I’ll try it again to see if they’ve improved things.

In the meantime, I have abandoned my initial multiple-boot scenario and gone back to my wonderful Kubuntu. It’s good to be home.