[ale] OT: Windows98 SE, bleah!

[BruceG]

Fixing up a donated laptop for a friend of my wife. A Win98SE thing (maybe 
I'll send it to her with a Knoppix CD as a "recovery" CD). Figuring out why 
I've been trying to get away from that platform.

Installed a wireless cardbus card. Hit critical updates. 16 of them! A bunch 
of downloads and 3 reboots later, saw that the patches required 3 more 
patches and a few more reboots. Then for non-critical updates. 2 reboots. 
Then to clean the drive of deleted files. Then defragged. Literally - wrapped 
it up at a little past 1:00AM. Created scheduled tasks: defrag, speed-up 
apps, anti-vir system scan.

Checked Anti-Vir subscription status. Urgh. Update (and need to bill it back), 
then run anti-vir. Think I'll run Norton SystemWorks from CD next, to find 
any little gotchas. Then create a boot floppy and rescue floppy (or see if it 
will boot from CD, and just go with Knoppix, lol).

I know it's off-topic, but given my newbie status (1 year. a little Mandrake, 
Red Hat, SuSE and Debian experience) - I'd much RATHER use a good simple 
clean Linux distribution.

Maybe I outta learn Scribus and write up a nice basic Linux user guide, print 
it out professionally and include a live-CD (oh yeah, somebody already did 
that with the "Kiss the Blue Screen whatever" book). I guess it could be done 
again with a community distribution (Mandrake Community? Fedora Core?)