The author recounts their journey from initially intending to develop software for Windows to becoming deeply involved in the Linux world after discovering the operating system during college. Recently, at NorthScale, the focus shifted back to Windows with the aim of adding support for memcached on the platform, leading to the author's renewed familiarity with Windows, the Mingw compiler, and the Msys environment. Although Windows has evolved significantly since the author's early experiences, including improvements in configuration and memory management, the project requires the use of Mingw to adhere to the C99 standard crucial for memcached, avoiding the complexities often introduced by pre-compiler directives. The setup process for Mingw and Msys varies between 32-bit and 64-bit Windows systems, involving the installation of Msysgit and Mingw-w64, with careful configuration of environment paths. This setup allows the author to compile code efficiently on Windows using familiar *NIX tools, ensuring compatibility with both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures by specifying appropriate flags during compilation.