I’ve upgraded my Windows laptop to XP. I was getting rather fed up with Win98, and, since I have two machines that came with XP, on which I use Linux, I figured I’d go ahead and use one of those licenses. The installation took several hours, most of which time it assured me that I had 12 minutes remaining. Very irritating.

And while I’m on the subject of irritations, right now I’m installing the stuff that came with my Creative Nomad MP3 player thingy. It’s a full-screen multimedia event. I can’t get to any other applications while it’s installing. Why would anyone *ever* want an installation program to be full screen and all-consuming? I want to get other things done while it installs. But I can’t, because I can’t get to anything else. And, since the installation looks like it’s going to take a half hour, at least, this is a source of much irritation.

Of course, most of these things are taking so darned long because it’s an old underpowered laptop. I’m sure that on hardware for which they were actually designed, it would go much faster. But still. It’s been at 5% for about 3 minutes now.