Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

I switched to the Mac a couple of years ago, but I still have a couple of Windows laptops around the house. They are both running Windows XP Home.

A couple of months ago one of the PC decided that it would no longer connect to the internet. But is isn't quite that simple.

When I start the PC everything is fine. After a few minutes I can no longer get to any sites in any browser. But I can still ping any address just fine. Looking on Google all I can fine are suggestions that I have a spyware or virus problem. I've checked and that isn't the case.

So nobody, including Microsoft, can explain why this is happening with XP.

Of course, while trying to solve the problem I killed as many processes as I could, only to find that many start up again all by themselves. And most are completely undocumented.

I get the sense that nobody, even Microsoft, knows what all of the pieces of XP do. That's probably why there are so many problems. So I'm back on the Mac.