I'm doing 22 things
A couple of weeks ago when my boyfriend was around to help out and supervise, I installed a new hard drive (well, I installed it, uninstalled it, and he reinstalled it to make sure it was seated properly, but the point is I learned how to do it!), and then we set about creating a dual-boot system of Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux.
It was a little stressful. It took two or three tries and by the last try my boyfriend was doing things I definitely wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing myself. It took a little experimenting to figure out how much of my IDE drive would be recognized (it’s an old system not compliant with SATA drives, and the answer was not the one we were expecting), and then he had to make a special boot partition for Linux at the front of my drive. I probably would have been able to follow instructions for it over the phone, but I wouldn’t have known how big to make the partition without help, for example. We were up until 1am for two nights over this. Honestly my boyfriend was doing most of it and I was just up supervising and fretting. :) A lot of the time was spent making sure the Windows install was secure, too, which I worked on more. I have an XP disc from waaaay back at the beginning when none of the service packs were out.
Ultimately it got done. My current boyfriend proved he would be helpful and dependable about computer stuff without being domineering (my ex was a little bit), so that was good. We celebrated by going to Cedar Point :)
My XP partition is almost completely to where it was before the reinstall. All the stuff under the hood is where it is supposed to be. I am one of those people who plays with services.msc and uses TweakUI and all that. My Firefox on the Windows side is just about perfect. I have all my Greasemonkey scripts in. Every once in a while I stumble on something I’d still like to change.
At this point, Ubuntu is less useful to me precisely because I know so little about it. I am trying to give it as much credit as it deserves. There are a lot of things that are second-nature to me in Windows because I’ve been on it since I was 7, when we got Windows 3.1. Linux doesn’t have that leg up with me. I think I am going to need to set aside a certain amount of time every week or two to just exist under Linux. I think the first steps will be installing a media player that works with last.fm (that doesn’t have a bug in it like whatever I picked for the first try) and trying all the Linux games.
This will require turning off The Sims, which, I must add, installed perfectly on Win XP. :)
x-posted: 43 Things and Livejournal
