Over the weekend I decided to backup all my stuff, wipe out my windows install, and start from scratch. I usually do this about once a year, but I have had some good luck and haven’t had to do it for about three years.
I think that after a while Windows just decides to kind of give up. Things stop working right or just stop working at all.
Some of the problem I had:
-Every time I opened my control panel, explorer crashed.
-I couldn’t install anything. Something was wrong with the windows installer which caused it to just stop. I would open an installation file, everything would look good, and then it would just stop. No error, no nothing.
-DirectX was just completely trashed. I believe that DX is set to fail anyways, but mine really failed. I had tried several different ways to upgrade it, but I just ended up making it think that it was running three different versions or something.
-It took me roughly 6 minutes to start up my computer. It would get to the “welcome to windows” screen and just sit there for about 5 minutes.
-Windows update was not working. I think this might have had something to do with the broken windows installer thing that I mentioned earlier, but either way I couldn’t do any updates.
-Slow. One word, that’s all I need. I run a Pentium III at 3.4Ghz with a gig of ram. There is no reason that my computer should run as slow as it was. I think there is some kind of magic ratio between the age of an installation and slowness of a computer.
All of these problems were just to much for me. I decided it was time to take action, and at 8:00 on Monday night I did. I also decided that while I was at it, I would install this new Ubuntu Linux that everyone is talking about. Here are the chronicles of how it went down.
8:00 PM - Backup
I have two hard drives in my computer. The plan is to wipe out the one that has XP installed on it. Before I do that I need to move anything that I want to keep to the other hard drive. This includes My Documents, Itunes play list, saved game files, etc. Due to my wife having a bunch of music stashed in my computer that I did not know about, this takes almost an hour and a half.
10:00 PM - Install #1
After finding the correct restore disk that came with my computer I was ready to go. There is only one problem. I can’t seem to boot from this disk. Oh well. I decide to run XP install from inside of my current install of XP. I don’t recommend this to anyone. If you try it, you won’t be be able to play around with your partitions like you would like to. Thinking I had no other option, I did it anyway. What I ended up with was two versions of XP installed on the same partition. This is not what I wanted. It is also not a good idea as the two installs can make changes to each other.
12:00 AM - Slow Down and Install #2
Now realizing that I just wasted about two hours on an install that I am going to have to do over again, I decide to take my time. Rushing this is only going to cost me more time. Slow and steady wins the race, right? So I get playing around with my BIOS and discover a setting about 3 menus deep that changes which CD/DVD drive your computer tries to boot with. I just thought that if you set it to check a CD/DVD drive as a boot option, it didn’t matter which one. I just assumed it would check both. You know what happens when you assume. So I change this “hidden setting”, put in the CD, it boots, and I feel like a dumbass. The second install goes a lot smoother, but still takes about an hour.
1:30 AM - Drivers
First things first, I have to get everything working. When I first get into my new install I have no sound, 800X600 Resolution, and no network. It’s a good thing that gateway is looking out for me. My computer came with a disk that installs almost every driver I would ever need. I was thinking that I would have to go through and manually install all these different drivers. I just popped the disk in and it did most of it for me. All I had to do after that was get the disk for my optical 5 button wheel mouse, and my wireless network thing. It was really looking like the end was near.
2:00 AM - Installing Programs
I had saved some installation files for different programs that I used, but I had no idea at the number of actual programs I use. This step probably took the most time of anything that I did. I would get installing something, and it would remind me of something else I used that I would need. Office, MSN Messenger, Firefox, Firefox plugins, Flash, Photoshop, Adaware, HTML Kit, iTunes, Azerus, Daemon Tools, Warcraft III, Partypoker, blah blah blah blah. It just went on and on and on.
4:30 AM - I’ll do it tommorow
At this point I am so tired that I can barely stay awake, and taking little naps while different programs are installing. At one point I wake up because my head slipped off of my hand and hit the shelf on my desk. I’m done for the night.
1:00 PM (The Next Day) - Linux
I had a ISO of a DVD for Ubuntu 6.06 - Dapper Drake. It wouldn’t boot. Only after about 15 minutes did I finally give up on it. I decided that it didn’t work, so I downloaded the ISO of the CD. That did work. Now, what this actually was is something called a “Live CD” which means that you can actually run Linux right from the CD without installing anything. It sounds like a good idea, but it’s really kind of a bad idea. It runs so slow it’s almost impossible to do anything. They recommend that you have 192MB of ram in order to run the live CD. I have 1GB and it ran slow. I can’t imagine trying to run it with only 192MB. It takes almost 15 minutes to fully load. At one point I think it is completely locked up because it is doing nothing, and has done nothing for a long time. My finger is hovering over the power button, and then I see the hard drive light flicker. I decide that I just need to walk away and hope that it is loaded when I get back. When it finally does get loaded it runs like a turtle. However, I was so impressed with the way it looked and worked that I didn’t really mind having to wait a minute for a menu to popup, or 4 minutes for a program to start.
2:30 PM - Installing Linux
Installing Linux is tricky. This is why I think that the world is not ready for Linux. It just not nice and easy like a Windows machine. When it reaches the point where you can put a disk in, install it, and everything works; that’s when people will use it. Anyway, I get the installation running, and it was time to play with partitions again. Linux needs 2 or 3 different partitions. 1. The root. This is where your file system is located. 2. The Swap. I don’t really know what the hell this actually is. 3. The boot. This is not required for Ubuntu, so I didn’t mess with it. I had to play around a little bit to get my partitions to work. The whole time I was in fear of screwing my Windows partition, losing stuff, and having to reinstall again. Once I got everything in line I let the install run while I watched some TV. After the longest install I have ever been a witness to (roughly 2 hours), I saw a message that said something like “restart required, remove the CD”. I did that and rebooted.
5:30 PM - Trouble in Bootville
What did I see on the reboot? Windows. That’s right, my computer doesn’t even recognize that Linux is there. Actually I can’t even prove that it is there. Windows won’t recognize Linux drives, so I can’t even see it. What is the problem? I don’t know. What I do know is that in most of the tutorials that I read through over and over is that at the end of the installation Ubuntu is supposed to ask you if you want to install GRUB, which is a boot loader for various different things. My installation didn’t ask me that. I don’t know why, but it just didn’t. This is where I am currently stuck. I have a few things I am going to try out, but at this point I keep asking myself “Do I really want to screw around with Linux?”. I know that my wireless network is not going to work with it, among other things. I know that I can’t run most of the programs through Linux that I use on a daily basis. I also know that it requires a lot of knowledge of things such as the shell, C programming, and scripting; which I do not have. Is it really worth it?
I think it is worth it.
.
As you say, sometimes it really gets screwed up, but on the other hand it’s the same if you first install linux (or any other os) and then windows. Windows actually don’t care if you have another os, or another bootloader, it just play dumb and screw your other os up
About the knowledge, you won’t need to know scripting, programing or shell. My girlfriend uses ubuntu (when she’s not playing the sims
) and don’t have to use the terminal, and she can do everything she wants to like read mail, surf the web, install new aplications, update the system, paly and download games etc etc.
I would say, try again so that you can get a fair picture of ubuntu/linux. If you like it maybe you’ll never use windows again. If you don’t, well then you don’t have to worry about the process of installing it until the next time you decide to try linux =).
In my opinion linux is really excelent as long as you don’t want to play new games on it.
[…] Another 6-8 months rolled by and Ubuntu is still gaining speed and momentum. Dapper Drake had been released for a while, and Edgy Eft was being talked about. (A new version of Ubuntu is released every six months and they give it a new name with the next letter of the alphabet). Right around the time of Dapper Drake, I desperately needed to do a clean sweep of my computer. That is, I needed to reformat the whole thing and start with a clean install of Windows. I decided that since I was going to do that I might as well partition some space off and install Ubuntu at the same time. (You can read all about that day in my post entitled “Adventures in installing Windows and Linux“) I got Ubuntu installed but right off the bat I couldn’t get it to dual boot, and when I could boot it, using the Super Grub Disk, my wireless card wasn’t recognized and therefore I didn’t have the Internet. I don’t know if anybody has ever tried to fix a problem, especially a driver problem, without having the Internet, but I’ll tell you right here and now — it sucks. You have to boot to Windows, find what you are looking for, then boot to Linux to see if it works, find out that it doesn’t, boot back to Windows, look around some more, and so on and so forth. I messed around with it for about a total of probably 7 or 8 hours before I once again said the hell with Linux and forgot all about it. […]