Musicalmidget’s Blog

I suppose you could call my recent computing activities as a kind of “adventure”. In my last rant I mentioned how a new hard drive was causing so many problems. The original hard drive I bought was dead on arrival and was taken back to the shop for a replacement, which I was also having problems with as mentioned in the previous post. I had the replacement drive checked and guess what, it was a dud too. My luck really wasn’t up.

The problems I had installing the dead drives (obviously before determining that they were infact dead) resulted in one of my existing working drives to also die. Sadly, it had a lot of my more important things stored on it. I lost lots of my music collection (most of which I can retrieve again thankfully). I also lost my local development server on which I was slowly producing a new and unique layout for this blog and also a tweaked version of the existing MyBB Mods site. Oh, had I not mentioned those before..?

Again, most of this stuff was backed up elsewhere and as yet I simply haven’t managed to get it all back onto the computer yet. Thankfully, the unfortunately large number of dead hard drives (the new drives and the old existing one) have now finally been replaced with a brand spanking new 250GB drive which works! Yes, it actually works! The new drive installed immediately and I’ve done a clean install of XP onto it which is much less cluttered and better organised than my previous installation. Using the fantastic piece of software which is Partition Magic, I’ve been able to partition the drive up in a way that keeps different parts of the operating seperate, including a partition for Windows, a partition for programs and another for work.

The only one of my previous drives which didn’t die during the last two weeks was, ironically, the old 40GB hard drive I originally set out to replace. It now seems that the problems I found on that drive weren’t so severe after all so I decided to keep it for a while longer. Originally I was just going to use it for yet more storage although the new drive seems to provide more than enough. So, what better use for it I wondered? Ah, how about I finally give Linux a try?

Ubuntu Linux 5.10 is what now resides on that drive. I’ve only been using it about a week but what I’ve seen so far I’m very impressed with. When the old hard drive it’s installed on eventually does give up, I’ll definately be finding space for another Ubuntu installation. It’s so nice and easy to use. Additionally, Ubuntu setup my LAN immediately without prompting me to do anything, which pleased me no end when it’s previously taken hours if not days to get XP to work properly with my LAN. And, as if that wasn’t enough, the icing on the cake was the nice touch of having Firefox installed automatically as my default browser. So, from the very first time I logged onto Ubuntu, my LAN and Internet was ready and waiting.

My only other previous experience with Linux was using Suse 9.1 on a virtual machine previously, although that wasn’t a particularly ideal environment. I’ve learnt much about Linux since installing Ubuntu and so far I’m loving it.

Tomorrow is my last day at university before the easter break. During the break, I’ll work on finishing getting my computer back to normal and probably most importantly, getting localhost up again. Maybe then I can get back to the things I’ve been working on, and you may just see some “updates” around here…