Odds are you probably never liked the Chrysler PT Cruiser, a retro-style five-door hatchback sold from 2001 through 2010. In fact, you might even hate it. Most people do. Just ask Tom Gale, Chrysler Corporation’s former vice-president of design.
"The PT Cruiser gets hammered by a lot of people,Θ Gale said. “But it really hit a spot. You know, we sold 1.3 million of those things.Θ
Today, it’s easy to forget how outrageously popular this compact car was when it was launched. Credit the PT Cruiser’s success to its retro look, which was a relatively new automotive design trend that was growing in popularity at the time. The PT Cruiser would ultimately be but one of many retro-style vehicles created by automakers. Others include the 1989 Nissan S-Cargo, 1991 Nissan igaro, 1992 odge Viper, 1993 BMW Z8, 1994 odge Ram, 1994 ord Mustang, 1997 Jaguar XK-8, 1998 Plymouth Prowler, 1999 Jaguar S-Type, 1999 Volkswagen New Beetle, 2001 Mini Cooper, 2002 ord Thunderbird, 2002 Jaguar X-Type, 2004 Chevrolet SSR, 2004 Chrysler Crossfire, 2004 ord GT, 2004 Jaguar XJ-8, 2006 Chevrolet HHR, 2008 odge Challenger, 2009 Chevrolet Camaro, 2011 iat 500, 2017 iat 124 Spider, and, most recently, the forthcoming 2022 ord Bronco.
For some reason the Winders bootloader is in odd path on my computer and GRUB was not automatically detected.
/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw-win10.efi
Rather then location it’s detecting in os-probe …
/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
Which when run just drops me hopelessly back to the grub the prompt, waiting for me to type exit and find the proper file by navigating the EFI menu.
But with a bit of custom GRUB-ing around the system, I was able to get the Winders so I can pick out from the boot menu and easily start it up without mucking around in EFI each time I need the Winders. Which I know absolutely nothing about, and I’m scared to death to play with GRUB because I know that it can break things and make my computer unable to boot, but so far it seems like dual booting is working.
But alas it works. I wish I wasn’t so bad for computers, having not a clue to how use this fancy technology.
For work I need to get access to the VPN for files on server and to access internal websites. Unfortunately, at least initially things need to be configured through Microsoft Windows 10, which I fortunately still have on my laptop but I have almost never used it. I always found MS Winders to be obnoxious – it’s always trying to sell you commercial software and is incredibly slow.
I had been resisting getting the VPN set up on my personal laptop, but it looks like it I will need it sooner then later. Unfortunately when I tried to boot windows, it had somehow gotten messed up in the grub bootloader, so I it wouldn’t boot. Apparently it couldn’t find bootmgfw.efi, which is the Winders BIOS bootloader. Which I know nothing about, but browsing various bootloaders in the EFI I was able to finally find a bootloader that fired up the ol’ Winders 10.
Then I found my version of Winders 10 is too out of date to install Cisco AnyConnect for the VPN access until I run the various security updates from the past 6 years. Which I am in the process of doing, but I’ll have to go down to the library so I don’t use too much bandwidth at home over the hotspot. It seems like the updating had stopped due to a lack of disk space, but I’ve been in the process of removing all the trial-ware and spamware to free up a lot of space in Windows.
I got rid of Office360, which I have never used. I will just use LibreOffice on the Linux side of things when I need office software. Or just Google Sheets. I got rid of dozens of trial-ware and commercial programs and games that came bundled with the laptop but I never plan to use. I don’t know what half of the programs do but I can’t imagine I will need an add on media player or games for a side of computer I have booted once or twice.
One of the worse programs to remove is McAfee Anti-Virus, which is entirely worthless spamware in the era of Windows Defender and the freeware AVR Anti-Virus. You can remove the program, but the McAfee ads continue to pop up on your screen until you manually purge the McAfee directories from your hard drive. It really is spamware if they continue to advertise their garbage program after you delete it using the built-in Winders program removal software.
For anti-virus, I will probably just stick with the built-in Windows Defender and make sure I have the latest patches, because outside of work sessions where I need something over the VPN I will just run Linux. I don’t plan to ever install any other Microsoft Winders software on the computer, so the risk is relatively low. It’s easy enough to just reboot into the Linux environment I have been using for decades and are comfortable with. Why the hell do you need anti-virus software when in Linux they just automatically apply the latest security patches with apt-get?
I stripped down everything I could find in Windows to strip down. No special or graphics effects, a simple blue background. I got all that crap tiles out of the Start Menu and restored the Start bar to it’s most basic list of programs to switch between. Then I rebooted the machine. No more advertisements for McAfee or Office 360 and the Winders environment is quite fast. Winders is now only 52 GB big at this point, meaning my Winders partition is 66% free and it is sane enough for me to use it without clutter while I have to use it.
So while I will be happier as a pig in shit when I reboot my laptop back into Linux with simple, old-fashioned XFCE window manager, I will survive when I absolutely have to use the Winders.
