uTorrent?

I recently installed Windows over Ubuntu, Vista to be specific and after finally getting it fully setup I dissapointingly got a BSOD, at first I thought my hardware was failing so I did a memory check and scandisk and for good measure installed a antivirus. This didn't stop the blue screens however, but I realised that every time I started my laptop I was starting uTorrent. So it turns out that while uTorrent was downloading a BSOD occured, more specificly I discovered that only while continuing a torrent I had started in Transmission caused the BSOD, other torrents downloaded fine.

I decided to try replicate this at work, which has plenty of machines to spare. So I setup Ubuntu on one computer and Vista on another, started a torrent with Transmission and copied the partial download from the Ubuntu computer to the Vista computer and added and started it with uTorrent, behold a BSOD.

Looks like I discovered a problem, probably in NTFS-3G, Windows or uTorrent.

Upon this realisation I searched Google for anyone else encountering the problem and found a thread on the official uTorrent forums http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=53839

I posted steps to reproduce the problem and stated that other Torrent applications did not cause the BSOD with the Administrators/Moderators replying that uTorrent is perfect and it is a problem with my machine or drivers after which I restated that I had tested this on multiple machines.

I gave up responing, but to finish my torrents I ended up setting up a Virtual Machine and used Transmission to download a bit more of the torrent then uploaded the changed file back to Vista using Samba..

Ubuntu Compiz

Are you suffering from video and misc applications flickering? Apparently Compiz interferes with applications drawing to the screen. To work around you need to change your video render to X. To fix you need to disable Compiz.

Thanks Ubuntu community.

Pidgin has useless plugins

dcop: not found shown in terminal while pidgin locks up? Kill your audio player process. If it still occurs open audio player, open pidgin and disable musictracker.

Thanks musictracker.

Linux Fails Again

Ubuntu CDs arrived the other day, spent some time looking stuff up on how to get the modem working while using the live CD; went to install it before I tried out any of the stuff I found and discovered that it the Ubuntu installer didn't detect any HDD's and thus wouldn't let me install.

All I can say is that Linux has had it's 6th or so try and still hasn't been able to be usable as an OS. Thankfully I used another HDD this time so I didn't loose Windows or any of the data on it and was able to happily install Vista which turned up no problems.

Previously different Linux distribution have done various things such as after happily formatting my hard drive failing to start X, leaving me without an internet connection (now that I realise I wouldn't have the drivers or whatever for the modem so I would've been screwed anyway) or a working computer (OEM refused to install with modified HDD). It has happily formatted my hard drive only to to stop installing half way through.

FreeBSD might not be as user friendly but at least it's not as destructive as Linux has been. Windows usually never encounters problems and has so far never left me without and OS.